How does a film capture a time and a place? All too often, film fails where literature succeeds, in spite of film’s ability to physically recreate the circumstances of the past. However, there’s more to capturing the past than merely painting a picture. The filmmaker needs to capture the rhythms of speech, the frames of mind, and something more – the poetic reality of the period. Because a film is not a slice of life – it is a story, manufactured with artificial constraints, and these constraints have to convince the watcher that they are valid, even if they’re not. Scorsese’s work is a prime example of how this can be achieved and how it can’t be. Gangs of New York exemplifying the latter, Goodfellas, to pick one from a bunch, the former.
All of which is preamble to an outrageous Russian film, which sets out to capture the demented period that preceded the fall of the Soviet Union. Its based on a true story of the abduction of the daughter of a Communist official. The film uses clips on TV to identify the period: Gorbachov sitting with one of the last politburos; various song and dance acts. Set-piece scenes depicting a kind of primitive illegal rave add to the sense of a society on the point of breaking out of the Soviet grip.
Within this world, the viewer is introduced to various characters, including a brash young Ukrainian who drives his own car, boyfriend to the daughter of a minor Soviet official; the devoutly Communist professor of Scientific Atheism at Leninsk University; and the owner of an illegal vodka distillery, who lives in his own private fiefdom in the middle of nowhere. The professor’s car breaks down near the distillery and he discusses God with the seemingly psychopathic owner. Later, the student picks up a girl and heads there to drink.
All of which devours an hour or so of screen time, with the pivotal characters yet to appear. Balabanov seems more concerned with describing this bizarre, edgy culture than telling their narrative. Until the moment when the apparent drifter at the distillery shoots a worker and kidnaps the girl the Ukrainian brought with him, driving her to Leninsk and handcuffing her to a brass bed in his near-senile mother’s apartment.
The drifter, it emerges, isn’t a drifter, but the genuinely psychopathic Captain Zhurov, head of Leninsk police. Leninsk police isn’t really a police force, but a mafia paramilitary defence unit. The Communists think they’re in charge, but they’re not. The girl says her boyfriend, a paratrooper due back from Afghanistan, will avenge her, but her boyfriend comes back in a coffin (the Cargo 200 of the title), the policeman takes possession of the coffin and throws the dead paratrooper in bed with the girl.
Before you realise it, this is not a slow-burning, droll look at the end of an era, but a full-on, gothic extravaganza of violence, fear and lunacy. And this, you start to say yourself, as the old lady watches the flickering images on TV, stepsister to Ellen Burstyn in Requiem for a Dream, might be exactly what that time was like.
Cargo 200 would never have got past the film company censors in this country. It’s constructed like a mess of a movie, with the main protagonist taking too long to emerge, the tone veering like a spinning drunkard, the genre beyond description. But when you walk out of the cinema, punchdrunk after 90 minutes which seem much longer, you can’t help thinking that this might by as good a depiction of that time and place as you’re likely to find. This is why empires crumble: not because they’re in coherent, functioning shape, but because they’re in utter, calamitous chaos.
All of which is preamble to an outrageous Russian film, which sets out to capture the demented period that preceded the fall of the Soviet Union. Its based on a true story of the abduction of the daughter of a Communist official. The film uses clips on TV to identify the period: Gorbachov sitting with one of the last politburos; various song and dance acts. Set-piece scenes depicting a kind of primitive illegal rave add to the sense of a society on the point of breaking out of the Soviet grip.
Within this world, the viewer is introduced to various characters, including a brash young Ukrainian who drives his own car, boyfriend to the daughter of a minor Soviet official; the devoutly Communist professor of Scientific Atheism at Leninsk University; and the owner of an illegal vodka distillery, who lives in his own private fiefdom in the middle of nowhere. The professor’s car breaks down near the distillery and he discusses God with the seemingly psychopathic owner. Later, the student picks up a girl and heads there to drink.
All of which devours an hour or so of screen time, with the pivotal characters yet to appear. Balabanov seems more concerned with describing this bizarre, edgy culture than telling their narrative. Until the moment when the apparent drifter at the distillery shoots a worker and kidnaps the girl the Ukrainian brought with him, driving her to Leninsk and handcuffing her to a brass bed in his near-senile mother’s apartment.
The drifter, it emerges, isn’t a drifter, but the genuinely psychopathic Captain Zhurov, head of Leninsk police. Leninsk police isn’t really a police force, but a mafia paramilitary defence unit. The Communists think they’re in charge, but they’re not. The girl says her boyfriend, a paratrooper due back from Afghanistan, will avenge her, but her boyfriend comes back in a coffin (the Cargo 200 of the title), the policeman takes possession of the coffin and throws the dead paratrooper in bed with the girl.
Before you realise it, this is not a slow-burning, droll look at the end of an era, but a full-on, gothic extravaganza of violence, fear and lunacy. And this, you start to say yourself, as the old lady watches the flickering images on TV, stepsister to Ellen Burstyn in Requiem for a Dream, might be exactly what that time was like.
Cargo 200 would never have got past the film company censors in this country. It’s constructed like a mess of a movie, with the main protagonist taking too long to emerge, the tone veering like a spinning drunkard, the genre beyond description. But when you walk out of the cinema, punchdrunk after 90 minutes which seem much longer, you can’t help thinking that this might by as good a depiction of that time and place as you’re likely to find. This is why empires crumble: not because they’re in coherent, functioning shape, but because they’re in utter, calamitous chaos.
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