Балабанов. Перекрестки

Aleksandr Pogrebnyak. Judgement of History: Balabanov’s Verdict

The main line of Balabanov’s films is philosophising contemporary Russian history whose logic is most clearly reflected in the dialectic trinary of “Dead Man’s Bluff”, “Cargo 200”, and “Me Too”. The first of those represents the 1990s, and its jocular tone enhances the critical diagnosis to the contemporary Russian statehood—the point is not even that an office with a view to the Kremlin is taken by a thug but that he is a subject who stakes on “safety measures” that guarantee him survival in any situation. “Dead man’s bluff” with a bulletproof folder is a sign of a radical dystopia—in the 1990s succeeded only he who was choosing foul play by default and preferred self-preservation instinct to existential authenticity—which is why the main value now would be “stability”, fair play for everyone else. “Cargo 200”, set in the 1980s, is not only a backstory but also an antithesis of “Dead Man’s Bluff”—even though motives of despair, pathology and absolute evil prevail here, utopian theme is also present; characters might kill and rape each other but nonetheless they all have human dreams—which is why a perspective, a horizon of future opens in the film’s end. Finally, “Me Too” may be seen as a final result: the people of Leninsk of the day before yesterday no more have a place in Moscow or Saint Petersburg; their “happiness” transformed into an “empty signifier”, and the “law” turned out to be the heaven’s irrational will; the power does not prevent them from going to the zone from which no one has ever returned.