Director – David Cronenberg – 2007 – Canada, UK – Cert. 18 – 100m
****
After a London midwife delivers a dying woman’s baby she finds herself attracting the attention of the Russian mafia – reviewed in Third Way, 2007; on BBC iPlayer until Thursday, October 6th 2022
An immediately recognisable, ethnically diverse London unseen in previous movies about the capital. A Chechen unexpectedly gets his throat cut in a barber’s shop; a pregnant Russian teenager walks into a chemist’s, asks for help and collapses in a pool of her own blood. Given the director, you’d be forgiven for expecting such imagery to pervade the whole film, but Eastern Promises originated not with Cronenberg but screenwriter Steven Knight, whose acclaimed screenplay for Dirty Pretty Things (Stephen Frears, 2002) explored the hidden, ethnic workforce in the underbelly of contemporary, multicultural London. (He also wrote the recent Wilberforce biopic Amazing Grace, Michael Apted, 2006).
Eastern Promises takes us into related territory, again in the capital – this time Russian Vory V Zakone gangsters, sex trafficking and murder. Cronenberg puts this on the screen with all the precision and finesse one would expect, eliciting terrific performances and contributions from cast and crew.
Trafalgar hospital midwife Anna Khitrova (Naomi Watts), the daughter of a Russian father and an English mother, provides our point of entry into this unfamiliar world as the midwife who must deliver the baby from the dying teenager. Desiring to find next of kin addresses so she can inform social services, Anna takes the deceased’s diary and has her Russian-born uncle Stepan (the wily Jerzy Skolimowski, a director here fulfilling acting chores) translate it.
As her uncle’s enthusiasm diminishes, she enlists the help of Russian restaurateur Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), unaware that his surface charm conceals his true identity as the ruthless head of a Vory V Zakone family, a Russian criminal Godfather. Semyon’s only son Kirill (Vincent Cassel) is a loud-mouthed, drunken buffoon, watched over by Armani-clad, smoothly efficient chauffeur Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen).
As with many of the characters in this cultural netherworld, there’s something a little odd about Nikolai. After fulfilling a command by Kirill in a brothel to “fuck one of these girls. Now. That’s an order”, Nikolai slips the Russian girl a wad of sterling notes and an image of a Orthodox icon, asking her surname and home town and telling the girl to “stay alive a little longer.”
Knight’s writing and Cronenberg’s direction further explore such themes as repressed homosexuality and statutory rape. Cronenberg brings visceral visuals to the party as well. In a sequence reminiscent of the cow’s eye / razor gag in surrealist masterpiece Un Chien Andalou (Luis Buñuel, 1929), Nikolai must cut the fingers off a corpse to prevent identification. Cronenberg sets us up with Nikolai’s back to us concealing the pliers about to cut the fingers, then changes angle to show pliers cut through one digit.
More gruesome still is the Turkish bath house, hand-to-hand combat scene wherein the unarmed, naked and tattooed Nikolai must defend himself against two knife-wielding Chechen assassins. It’s a deeply unsettling sequence, destined to go down as one of the most disturbing and bloody fights ever captured on celluloid.
And yet. As ever with Cronenberg, behind the viscera, violence and body horror is a fascination with our humanity. Anna, it is revealed early on, had a baby fathered by a black boyfriend whom she has since left, making her subsequent attachment to the newborn Christine all the more poignant. Kirill struggles with his father’s disappointment in him and continually messes up. Anna’s uncle Stipan claims in moments of male bravado to have worked for the KGB. Semyon’s charming facade conceals terrible dark secrets. But the real conundrum is Nikolai. What is it about this character that should be ruthless and repellent? It fascinates us, as if there were an inner goodness at work within him. (Knight’s narrative resolves this issue in a twist it would be criminal to reveal).
Those who fondly remember the director’s earlier body horror outings, which earned him the title The King Of Venereal Horror¸ may be surprised how Cronenberg has moved on. He remains one of the very few directors to further develop the language of cinema when you think everything has been done. More importantly perhaps, his compassion for his characters and the complexity of their dilemmas he explores mark Cronenberg out as one of the finest directors of his generation. While it may not be among his very best work, Eastern Promises sees Cronenberg refusing to be pigeon-holed or play safe and pulls some unexpected tricks out of its truly remarkable, hit the nail on the head, bag.
This review originally appeared in a slightly shortened version in Third Way when the film was released in 2007. On BBC iPlayer until Thursday, October 6th 2022.
Trailer:
UK release date 26/10/2007
David Cronenberg’s Crimes Of The Future, also starring Viggo Mortensen, is in cinemas from Fri, September 9th.