Eastern Promises

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David Cronenberg gives every impression of being at the peak of his powers. He's followed up the widely acclaimed A History Of Violence with another sleekly grim gangster thriller trespassing between the safe, conventional world most of us live in and the illegitimate danger zone that exists, often unacknowledged, on the dark side of the street. It's all the more menacing in this case for being located so close to home, principally on the mean streets of Clerkenwell.

This tight, superbly controlled film gets off to a bloody start with an uncomfortably close shave in a barbershop. Then we're transported to a birth scene that is also a death: an unknown 14-year-old girl is brought off the street and into hospital, where she dies in childbirth. It is Christmas Eve. One of the nurses goes through the girl's possessions in the hope of finding some form of identification. The best lead appears to be a diary, written in Russian. The nurse, Anna Khitrova (Naomi Watts) is of Russian descent herself, so she takes the diary home and asks her uncle to translate it.

When he balks ("Do you always steal from the dead?") she follows a clue to a Trans-Siberian restaurant. The owner, Semyon (Armin Mueller Stahl) has no information about the girl, but he indicates he is willing to translate the diary for her. On returning home, however, Anna finds her uncle has changed his mind. What he tells her is upsetting: this is the diary of a child lured across Europe with false promises then forced into drugs and prostitution by the Russian mafia, the Vory V Zakone. Despite Semyon's apparent friendliness and the neutral but not disinterested gaze of his driver, Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen), Anna senses she has unwittingly strayed into the lion's den. In fact it's far worse than she ever imagines. Nikolai is ordered to tie up these worrying loose ends. Fortunately his own loyalties are not quite what they seem.

Screenwriter Steve Knight's previous credit was Stephen Frears' Dirty Pretty Things, and there is a similar interest here in the hidden London, exploring an immigrant subculture we're only dimly aware of. A scene in which Nikolai is inducted into the Vory V Zakone - stripped to reveal the tattoos that tell his life story - is riveting in the same way that Scorsese's gangster films are; it's an authentic insight into a closed world.

Perhaps it's down to Mortensen's exact, meticulous, enigmatic performance, but everything that Nikolai does is interesting, whether it's the way he disposes of a corpse or his solicitous efforts to repair a broken down motorcycle. He manages to suggest both ruthless efficiency and a bedrock of compassion without giving away anything that might be held against him.

The film is less confident when it comes to Anna: Watts never quite pulls together the traits Knight has bestowed on the character to make her whole. She's got that Russian heritage, an unhappy love affair and a miscarriage to define her - as well as a hand-me-down bike - but after the first 20 minutes Anna becomes a peripheral figure in the drama, a rather too convenient mother in waiting for the orphaned baby.

I wasn't comfortable with Vincent Cassel's flamboyant performance as Semyon's son and putative successor, Kirill, either; neither the writer nor the actor give this role the shading it needed to flesh out the emotional response that seems to be called for. Maybe if Nikolai was really interested Kirill the movie might have been genuinely transgressive, but as it stands the disappointingly conventional resolution is both too contrived and too pat for that.

Even so, there's no denying this is a tremendous piece of genre entertainment. Cronenberg gives the story a lustrous dark fluidity that's immensely compelling, and three or four brutally visceral set pieces (one of them a sex scene, another a naked threeway knife fight in a Turkish bath) are absolutely stunning, right up there with the director's best work.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com

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Critics' Reviews

Rating of 3
stars out of 5 Wally Hammond, Time Out

Just as the shivering ghost of Coppolas Godfather hovers over the gruesome opening barbershop murder in... read more on www.timeout.com

Members' Reviews

Reviews Voted Most Helpful

Racial Stereotypes

A customer from London , 19/11/2007

Poorly directed and unprofessional film which lacks basic background knowledge about Eastern Europe. The cast is inappropriate and unconvincing and the plot is shallow and predictable. All characters are grotesque stereotypes whose sole purpose seems to be to convince viewers from the western world that everybody in Eastern Europe is either a gangster, a pimp, a racist, a homophobe or a prostitute. In an age in which racial stereotypes are frowned upon in all developed societies I find this unacceptable.

The film's secret weapon of attracting audiences is violence and nudity...The fact that British viewers reacted to it so positively is disappointing and worrying.

As a film student, I have seen numerous contemporary features from all over the world, yet this one is undoubtedly one of the worst.

244 out of 262 people found this review helpful

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Eastern Promises

SAI81 from Tonbridge [Highly rated reviewer] , 06/11/2007

There are few directors working whose films you can look at and almost immediately say “so and so directed this”. David Cronenberg is one of the few. His preoccupations have stayed strong throughout his career and his long history of working with the same collaborators film after film gives his work a distinctive look and feel.

Eastern Promises, like A History of Violence before it doesn’t look, at first glance, particularly Cronenbergian yet scratch the rather generic surface and you’ll find a film that is not just unmistakably David Cronenberg’s work but one that is unmistakably some of his best work.

When a young Russian girl dies giving birth Anna (Watts), the midwife who attended her, takes her diary in order to try and find the child’s family. To get it translated she goes to Seymon (Armin Mueller Stahl) who, unknown to Anna, is high up in London’s Russian mafia. When it becomes clear that the diary contains things that Seymon doesn’t want to come out about himself and his son Kiril (Cassel) he sets Nikolai (Mortenson), Kiril’s ‘driver’ the task of cleaning up the mess.

Eastern Promises story is not particularly original and the film goes to places that other gangster films have visited before but it is in the telling that the film excels.

The film sucks us in with expert performances from all concerned. Mortenson, who acts in impeccably Russian accented English, Russian and Ukrainian in the course of the film, spent a long time preparing to play Nikolai, spending time touring Russia alone to pick up the language and researching vory v zakone. This hard work pays off and he conveys great menace by delivering a quiet performance that only briefly erupts into violence. Importantly he also makes

Nikolai seem human, a deal more morally complex than a simple gangster.

Naomi Watts draws on her British heritage (she was born in Shoreham in Kent and lived in England until she was seven) and gives Anna a note perfect accent; neither too clipped nor a cor blimey cockney cliché. She gives a strong performance as a woman who, wanting to do the right thing, finds herself way out of her depth. There’s nothing showy here, she’s not courting awards, it’s simple, solid, character acting.

Perhaps best of all among the cast is Armin Mueller Stahl who seems at first to be a benevolent character but Stahl chills the bone as he is revealed as being more and more vile as the film runs on. Like Mortenson he’s never over the top, and the performance and the film are all the more effective for that. Look for Stahl’s name among next years Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominees.

David Cronenberg has long been fascinated by the body and by violence and though these preoccupations are more dialed back than in, say, eXistenZ or Dead Ringers they contribute some of Eastern Promises most memorable moments. The violence is largely brief, but it is impactful for that. The brutal slit throat in the first scene establishes immediately that we are not dealing, in the vory v zakone, with anti-heroes but it is an attempt on Nikolai’s life that proves most memorable. The two on one fight takes place in a sauna, which means that Mortenson does the whole 4 minute sequence stark naked. Forget the shaky cam mess, which rendered The Bourne Ultimatum’s fights an exercise in motion sickness, Cronenberg keeps his cutting under control and lets the fight play out at almost excruciating lengths. This is punchy, painful looking stuff and should go down as one of the finest, and one of the more unusual, fights in cinema.

Eastern Promises isn’t quite perfect though. The ending seems a bit rushed, as if Cronenberg was required to deliver a film of a certain length (it’s 95 minutes minus credits) and there’s a moment about 5 minutes from the end which felt massively and irritatingly contrived. However these are very minor gripes about what is a major work from a great filmmaker and if you are even remotely interested in cinema you really should see Eastern Promises.

73 out of 75 people found this review helpful

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Dreadful

Kinders Kinley from Oxford , 08/11/2007

Viggo Mortensen makes a valiant attempt to salvage an otherwise dreadful film. Unfortunately, even his layered character (the only character with any depth, and even that is diminished during an uncompelling twist) can't save Eastern Promises from the truly abysmal script, stereotypical caricatures, performances that are all either camp or plain lazy and an absurd and generally quite uninteresting plot. To top it off, there are occasional moments of gore that are both absurd and totally uncharacteristic of the rest of the film. Miss this.

60 out of 63 people found this review helpful

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Dreadful

Kinders Kinley from Oxford , 08/11/2007

60 out of 63 people found this review helpful

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