Film
Guaranteed to give you shivers
Published 18 October 2007
Cronenberg, the master of disgust, delivers a flawed but subversive thriller
Eastern Promises (18) dir: David Cronenberg
David Cronenberg made his name in horror, but it isn't only flesh that he loves to dissect. He relishes, too, the unravelling of social etiquette, whether it's the unremarkable folk transformed into sex maniacs in Shivers, the family man revealed as a hardened killer in A History of Violence, or the horny tailgaters of Crash, who will shunt your car and be too busy climaxing to swap insurance particulars. Eastern Promises, which opened the London Film Festival on 17 October and is released on 26 October, is a long way from his best, but it has that same preoccupation, as well as the mixture of curiosity and nastiness unique to this director. How nasty is it? Some films give you a knot in the stomach. This one induces peristalsis.
Most of the violence is dished out by the taciturn Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen), odd-job man for the Russian mafia in London. He knows the best way of defrosting a corpse (with a hairdryer) and disguising its identity (remove the teeth and fingers), and he can also extinguish a cigarette on his tongue - all great for breaking the ice at parties. But Nikolai is an ambitious soul who hopes eventually to replace the kingpin, Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), although that top job appears to entail little more than pensively nursing a shot of vodka for hours on end.
When a young midwife, Anna (Naomi Watts), arrives at Semyon's restaurant clutching a diary belonging to a Russian woman who died in her care, Semyon realises he must prise the diary from Anna. If she reads it, she will realise, as we do, that the dead woman was forced into prostitution by the mafia. "But" - I hear you cry - "Anna can't speak the lingo." No - but why else do you think the screenwriter has given her a Russian uncle?
It would need a supplementary pamphlet to list all the things wrong with Eastern Promises. For starters, there's the portrayal of London; Semyon accuses it of being a "city of whores and queers", which sounds much more fun than the two streets and one alley to which most of the film is confined. Then there are the comically clueless extras (sorry, "background artists") who are supposed to be playing rowdy football fans, but call to mind instead a poor turnout at a WI coffee morning. Some flaws can be blamed on Steven Knight's script, which is as contrived as his earlier, similar Dirty Pretty Things. But it is astonishing that Cronenberg, who has made plausible some of cinema's grisliest scenarios, can't pull off the simplest scenes of Anna with her family. Could it be that he can do exploding heads, disintegrating bodies and mutant, hammer-wielding children, but he can't do life?
Knight should be credited, however, for inverting the conventional thriller dynamic in a striking way. It seems a foregone conclusion that Anna, who is protecting both the diary and the dead woman's newborn baby, will find herself in peril. Remarkably, she never does. Instead it is Nikolai, sent by Semyon to collect the incriminating diary, who is terrorised, attacked and generally on the receiving end of the sort of treatment usually reserved for women in films. One minute he's being harangued by Semyon's son Kirill (Vincent Cassel), who forces him to have sex with a trafficked prostitute to prove he's not gay - an example, it transpires, of the pot calling the kettle a closet case. Next he's stripping to his briefs to show off his tattoos, before reclining like a Renaissance nude while another illustration is added to his flesh.
Nowhere is this feminisation more pronounced than in the brutal fight sequence in a sauna, which requires Nikolai not only to defend himself against two knife-wielding thugs, but to do so without so much as a fig leaf to spare his blushes. Mortensen, with his slicked pile of steely dark grey hair making his violin-like face look even longer, provides an unassailable core of authenticity and empathy throughout this often ludicrous film. He's a master of minimalism - what most actors need a monologue to express, Mortensen can convey in one wordless close-up, from behind sunglasses. But a long, naked fight sequence? You've got to admire his balls. And now you can. lLove, betrayal and Aids in 1980s France in this intelligent, well-acted drama.
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