I had heard so much about Balabanov's most recent film, Gruz 200 (Náklad 200, Russia 2007. I read about it in Russian Newsweek about a year ago, even before it was released. And everyone, everywhere just talked about how it was so violent and so horrific, how could someone make a film like that, furthermore it's not true! It shows Russia as a nightmare world, we can't have people think that about us! Before you raise your eyebrows, it's true. Russia is not nearly as terrible as the world that Balabanov created in this film. Though... in fact the film was based on real events...

Gruz 200 is in effect a horror movie. It tells the story of a maniac who kidnaps and tortures a young girl. She is taken by a gentleman friend to a place where he can buy vodka. He passes out, she is hidden by the wife in the cowshed. She successfully avoids the drunk master of the house, but just as her panic might have subsided, another strange man who had been hanging around the buildings has the shed opened by the Vietnamese servant Sun'ka. When he starts to touch her Sun'ka starts to protest - "hey, you can't do that!" and so the stranger just shoots him, and starts to do as he wishes with the terrified young girl. Her rifle taken from her trembling fingers straight away, the girl can't think of any other way to protect herself than to cry, "My father is a Communist Party boss! My fiancé is a paratrooper, he'll come back and he'll kill you!" Not surprisingly, these threats do not work. Things for her get worse and worse, as the guy Valera who brought her there wakes up and escapes as fast as his little legs will take him. The man, who is called Zhurov, takes her back to his house in the next town and locks her up there. He turns out to be a police chief, and is in charge of investigating her disappearance. And he uses the authority that he has to bring her horrific torments. Watching this film, you can't believe the tragedy being piled on and on.

Along with this central sequence of atrocities we see the people who are affected by them. Tonya, the wife from the vodka house, Artem, a professor from Leningrad, who teaches Scientific Atheism and whose niece is friends with the kidnapped girl and supposedly engaged to the boy who drove her away. Also, the girl's parents, the drunken and perverse friends of the so-called "Zhurik"...

The intricate way in which all the events are interlinked and the sheer shock of the film's violence both have an extremely strong effect on the viewer. Watching this, we often gasped, clamped our palms over our gaping mouths. It's clear why people were shocked by this film. But then again, it's also clear why Balabanov did it. Though it would be so easy to give in to the gut reactions and dismiss this film as an attack on the senses of senseless violence, we must look past our physical reactions and think a little. Gruz 200 uses violence and disgusting behaviour to draw our attention to the characters. All of the characters are immoral in some way. Zhurov is, of course, a psychopath, and his twistedness is clear, but also Tonya, who murders. The girl-victim, who is not entirely faithful to the paratrooper boyfriend she calls upon, Valera, who cheats on his "fiancée" and then leaves his new date for dead, Alexei, the master of the house, who rants about God and the soul and utopian dreams, and then tries to find the girl and rape her. Even Artem, who seems so nice, offers to help Tonya in any way he can... except he can't bear witness in court because the authorities might find out and, "you understand... term is about to start..." Why are these characters all so horrific? One cannot just draw a sweeping judgement and say that Russian nature is like that. This movie is set in a very particular time. All props and costumes and dialogues and music show very clearly that this is pre-perestroika time -- in the mid 1980s. And at the end we are even shown explicitly with a title across the screen: "It was the second half of 1984...."

This was the time when Soviet ideology really had no meaning any more, except maybe for the odd 'idealist', like our Artem, who argues fervently that there is no soul and economics and society control morality... But even he is doubting these ideas at the end, enquiring about baptism. Russian society no longer made sense, but they were still living within the rules and processes of the Soviet state. So corruption and double-dealing spreads, actions are meaningless, morality seems not to be based on anything. As always in Balabanov's films (Brat and Brat 2 became cult pictures thanks in part to their russkij-rok soundtracks) the music has a great deal of meaning. Contemporary artists such as Kino, DK, Jurij Loza, Pesnjari and Zemljane back the film. The music, of course, acts nostalgically upon Russian viewers, but for those foreigners who can understand the lyrics, we can grasp a great deal of meaning: Tsoi's song Vremja est', a deneg net (Got time, but no money) closes the film and laconically expresses the emptiness that pervaded life. "Got no smokes, got no fire, there's no light in my friends' windows. I've got time, but no money, no friends to go and see."

Balabanov has made several films about the perestroika era, and this one about the period preceding it. One might ask, why don't you move forward a little bit, why are you so fascinated by this period? But arguably, he is right to examine this time, which was so troubling for Russia and today is still remembered with pain and relief that it's over. How can we understand where we are now if we don't know where we came from? As Alexei says just before he is shot in the back of the head, "Things are going to change soon."