EASTERN PROMISES
Reviewed by Sam Hatch
As a film fanatic it's been fascinating watching vanguard Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg mellow with age. His modern films are commercial yet no less disturbing or scarring. As was the case with his previous film, the masterful A History of Violence, people were walking out of his newest effort commenting on the abundance of gore they had just witnessed. In reality, there are only a few scenes of unbridled grisly violence on display in Eastern Promises, but the difference between Cronenberg and many other directors is that he refuses to show violence in films if the audience won't feel it.
His commerciality is a ruse – it's like picking up a Coca Cola and finding it laced with vodka and 'shrooms. Granted, Cronenberg has toned down the surreal visuals and fantastic bodily corruptions, but he's still fascinated with all matters of identity and the flesh. It takes a genius with a ton of classics under his belt to realize that he can abandon his explorations of 'the new flesh' and still shock people with 'the old school flesh'. Throats are slit and grievous knife wounds are sustained, but perhaps the most interesting element of the body on display in Eastern Promises is the element of tattoos. The Russian mobsters haunting these dark corners of London are dressed in ink, yet every monochromatic brand explains a part of the person's life. Flesh itself is now a storytelling device. Talk about a history of violence – these guys are covered in it!
One such tatted historian is Nikolai Luzhin, played both mysteriously and charmingly by the underrated Viggo Mortensen (A History of Violence, Aragorn of the Lord of the Rings trilogy). He plays a lowly driver (and secret mastermind of body disposal techniques), newly accepted into the outer fringes of the Russian vory v zakone criminal elite. His bosses are the squirrely Kirill (Frenchman Vincent Cassel, who sports a great leather jacket) and that man's father Semyon (a calmly menacing Armin Mueller-Stahl). Semyon's a high ranking player who pretends to be a simple restaurateur, and it's through this connection that these twisted gangsters encounter Naomi Watts' Anna Khitrova.
Anna is a doctor at Trafalgar hospital and is a British citizen of half-Russian heritage. She still tools around astride her deceased father's Russian motorbike (looking almost comic in her goggles), lives with her widowed mother Helen ( Sinéad Cusack) and keeps in contact with her surly uncle Stepan (Jerzy Skolimowski) when she needs him to translate a diary of a deceased patient. The writer was a young prostitute who passed during childbirth, and Anna subsequently locates the diary among the woman's belongings. Partially fueled by a personal history of maternal trauma, Anna becomes acutely determined to locate a relative of the baby and spare it a life of group homes.
Anna's foul-mouthed bigot of an uncle proves less than helpful (he's none too keen on sifting through the filthy travails of a prostitute), so upon discovering an inserted business card for Semyon's social club, she innocently goes to the source. These scenes are brimming with tension and danger, as we know that Anna's fly should probably not be nosing around the lair of this particular spider. Mueller-Stahl is fantastic as a doting, fatherly figure that is charmed by Anna despite her ignorant meddling in mafia affairs. For such a nice guy, we later learn that he rapes young girls and dopes them up to join his legion of whores.
While Uncle Stepan hates blacks (he sees the fact that Anna once dated a man of color as the cause of many of her miseries), Semyon harbors intolerance for homosexuals. Unfortunately, his son Kirill is most likely among their despised ilk, and turns to alcohol when not protesting his own aversion to 'queers'. He spends as much time cuddling up with Nikolai as possible (in the guise of manly hugs of comradeship), and goes so far as to force the man to have sex with a hooker while he watches.
The nudity in that segment alone would be enough for one film, but Cronenberg and screenwriter Steven Knight stage a highly asexual scene later on in which an entirely unclad Nikolai is forced into deadly battle with two mafia heavies at a bathhouse. It's the scene that's been talked about the most and for good reason – it's a visceral, bludgeoning bit of nastiness where the flesh is exploited in just about every way possible. Tats. Dangly bits. Gaping knife wounds. It's all there and it's in your face. I've seen plenty of fight scenes that delve into humanity's animal nature, but it's much more focused and poignant with a nude man doing the damage. It shows how fragile and awkward we really are when stripped of jeans and cool leather jackets.
The remainder of the film is a relatively quaint gangster film about one man climbing the criminal totem pole in a small family operation that's under fire from the police (Kirill complains that they keep taking his prostitutes) as well as rival factions (the grisly assassination that opens the film sends shockwaves through the rest of the plot). While there are generous portions where Anna is absent from the screen, the story of her fascination with this world is never far out of mind. She's drawn to these people like a moth to a flame, driven by multiple levels of compulsion. Semyon could so easily become a substitute father figure. Nikolai is mysterious enough that she becomes attracted to him against her better judgment. The fate of the motherless baby evolves into a personal obsession, the result of which may either heal her own wounds or drive her mad. This realm is also unhealthy because the women who populate it can only be wide-eyed innocents or spirit-drained victims – or in too many cases a collision of both.
Once again, there's something about Cronenberg's imprint that is undeniable. He uses the same cameras, lenses and film stock as other filmmakers, yet there's always something slightly bent that comes out of the developed product. There are some great shots in the film, such as the one with the partially clad figure of Nikolai casually reclining in a restaurant booth while a man tattoos stars on his knees. Cronenberg also continues his trend of choosing endpoints that are very smart yet highly frustrating for certain members of the audience. While Eastern Promises does wrap up just about everything, it ends with a simple shot that doesn't seem very important at all. But then it sits with you, returning every so often to beggar new questions. As with A History of Violence, it asks its audience to carry on the conversation after the primary talker has left the building.
There's also been a lot of grumbling that this film doesn't quite match the raised expectations Cronenburg fans (Crone-ies?) have been amassing over the past few years. I have to say that I felt fully satisfied by the film, despite occasionally wondering if Anna's story was going to be able to match the larger, more fascinating arc of Viggo's character. There's also a rather interesting twist dropped later on that is subtle enough and makes complete sense (in fact, many will probably see it coming). There are plenty of onion-like layers to work through, and in the end we're left with another Cronenberg winner that should please the deviants and art-house aficionados alike.