Aleksey Poluyan

Synopsis:
A young woman is taken hostage by a police officer and subsequently abused by the lawman gone mad.

Review:
The term Cargo 200 refers to the bodies of USSR soldiers brought home from Afghanistan in the 1980s, but in Aleksei Balabanov’s film of the same name every character seems destined to become Cargo 200, either actually ending up dead or at least ending up in a dead-end quagmire of pointless violence and immoral behaviour. Unflinching would be a gentle word to describe this portrayal of a doomed humanity, but the exact point of the film beyond its doomsday message is never really clear. Unlike other recent excursions into nihilism as expressed through heartless sex and pointless violence (Mortier’s Ex Drummer comes to mind as a recent example), Balabanov’s film never goes beyond stating the obvious.Read More »

Synopsis (courtesy of the two IMDB comments):
Very cinematic Russian tale of alienation and lost identity
I saw this film on a local government television station in Australia called SBS which played it at midnight. There’s something very beautiful about this film which despite being set amidst the cold, harsh landscape of a desolate Russian territory it features the vitally honest, wan, lost eyes of the lead actor (whose name I can’t recall regrettably) whose vivid sense of alienation was extremely memorable. Its a B&W film about a military guard who finds himself lost amidst his fellow guards’ corruption and his own painful sense of duty versus his sense of goodness. Read More »