Eastern Promises

dir: David Cronenberg
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Eastern Promises, being a David Cronenberg film, promises more than it should and delivers more than you’d expect. There’s no shortage of flicks out there about organised crime, but it takes a unique one to stand out from the morass.

A look at the Russian mafia isn’t exactly new either. But the screenplay by Stephen Knight and the whole bloody production, overseen by one of the masters of cinema (even if he is Canadian), creates a living, breathing, unnerving story about, amongst other things, how nasty old people can be.

A pregnant fourteen-year-old girl (Sarah-Jeanne Labrosse) staggers into a chemist, bleeding all over the place. She gives birth to a tiny girl later in hospital, and promptly dies. The midwife, Anna (Naomi Watts) searches the poor girl’s belongings to find out where she comes from so see can give the little baby (who she’s named Christina, in honour of rapidly approaching Christmas) to her family.

The problem is, all she has to go on is a diary in Russian. Anna has a Russian background, but needs the diary to be translated. Propelling the plot forward, she also finds a card which directs her to a Russian restaurant called the Trans-Siberian in the heart of London.

Now, I’m sure you could guess that the kindly old man Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl) who runs the restaurant and offers to help her out is probably not just a kindly old grandfatherly type. Of course he’s going to end up being the ruthless kingpin of a Russian crime syndicate.

But the many virtues of the story aren’t in the plot surrounding the life and death of poor Tatiana, the mother of baby Christina. They’re in the rich details fleshed out by a filmmaker more concerned with creating a believable and intriguing microcosm around both the diaspora Russian émigrés in Britain, and the complexities of the Russian criminal underworld.

On top of that, we get Viggo. Probably more Viggo than we ever knew we wanted, but there’s plenty of Viggo to go around, and thus he should be shared.

In a seemingly low position within Semyon’s organisation as a driver, Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen) exudes both menace and intelligent restraint in equal measure. His job mostly seems to entail keeping Semyon’s reckless son Kirill (Vincent Cassell) in check. He is covered in the kinds of prison tattoos that act as a crim’s resume for those in the know.

When his path crosses with Anna’s he seems to show little if any interest in her tale of Tatiana’s woes and Christina’s plight, but we rapidly get the idea that Semyon and his henchmen are very concerned with the contents of Tatiana’s diary, and thus they start taking those steps the Russian mafia is famous and celebrated for.

In a seemingly unrelated subplot (like there’s ever such a thing), Kirill organises the killing of a former friend without his father’s knowledge. This leads to complications down the track for all concerned when the guy’s Chechen brothers want revenge.

And as we all know, revenge is a dish best served steaming hot when you’re naked. This of course is an allusion to the infamous bathhouse scene between Nikolai and two guys. No, it’s not the kind of encounter you’d expect between three men in a San Franscisco or Wellington Street in Collingwood bathhouse, but Viggo gets to prove, like anyone doubted it, that he’s just as dangerous naked as he is clothed, if not more so.

I don’t think I can really say enough about Viggo in this role. He embodies this seemingly simple character completely, and he has just so much goddamn presence that I felt like I was watching a much older film starring Lee Marvin or some other badass from the past. He just physically and even dialogue-wise convinces at every stage, despite, like all of the main characters, not being a native Russian speaker. If the reports are true about the lengths Viggo went to in order to prepare for the role, then it’s no wonder he believes in the role so much.

And it’s not easy, either. It’s a difficult balancing act to maintain the menace as well as make him a sympathetic character (at least until we find out one crucial aspect to his identity), because we are regularly shown the lengths these monsters must go to just to maintain appearances in their world.

On the back of his wonderful work in Cronenberg’s previous flick A History of Violence, it’s a great double act. In History he had to be convincing as a man who suppressed the monster he is for the benefit of his family for over fifteen years, only to have it come out by force of circumstance. In Easter Promises, the monster is on the surface from the start, casual like, but it is a mask hiding even greater depths beneath.

Anna and Nikolai get a whole bunch of scenes together, suffused with trepidation on Anna’s part at first, and then abject terror when she realises what these people are capable of. But there is some tenuous connection between them as she becomes increasingly more desperate to protect Christina and to reveal the circumstances of the baby’s origins.

Kirill, as played by French actor Vincent Cassell, is something more of a stock character. He’s the classic weak son of the powerful man seen in crime stories as diverse as The Godfather films, Road to Perdition, Braveheart, the New Testament of the Bible, Pusher II: With Blood on my Hands and a whole bunch of other flicks I won’t bother to keep listing.

He starts off loathsomely hideous, and persists at it achieving a wonderful level of persistent loathsomeness, but even he gets a chance for redemption by story’s end. Cassell, whilst not a tremendous actor, is fascinating to watch, even as such a repulsive character.

Mueller-Stahl as crime lord Semyon manages the transition from avuncular, kindly old geezer to ruthless monster with little more than a change in the set of his eyes. That twinkle in his eyes when talking about his daughters can shift from charming to lethal in half a nanosecond flat. When he starts planning what he plans to protect his interests, I had no difficulty believing he’d organise to have my family dismembered if I didn’t review the film positively afterwards. It still feels like he’s watching me know.

Whilst the violence is not a surprise to any watchers of previous Cronenberg outings, it comes as a surprise even to me as to how nasty it can get. It’s not surprising or out of place, since we are talking about murderous criminals and not Boston high society in The Age of Innocence, but I have to admit even I cringed from some of the gore on display. Cronenberg has often been accused of fostering a particular fascination with the human body, and especially the corruption or distortion thereof (often referred to as ‘body horror’: a horror inspired by the repulsiveness of the body itself then taken to extremes), but now he gets to let it serve the interests of what is, for him, conventional filmmaking.

In truth even the nature of the plot of Easter Promises sounds too tame for Cronenberg, but he really does raise the material to a level beyond its pulpy origins and the temptation to resort to clichés and the usual shittiness pervading such fare is studiously avoided. This peek into the world of the ‘vor v zakone’, the “thieves in law” criminal society arising from the Soviet prison system, and its arcane and complex traditions, is as fascinating as it is entertaining. For me, at least. You could hate it.

You could find the ending somewhat anti-climactic. You could find the violence excessively over the top and gratuitous. You could find the depiction of the lives of Russian 'kidnapped' girls as being horribly depressing. You could find the role Naomi Watts plays as being a bit of a thankless one. You could find the likelihood of Nikolai knowing exactly where another character is going to go with a piece of precious cargo on an unholy mission as being highly dubious.

Christ knows I did, but I still loved the flick. I’m very impressed by the work here, and, at the film’s end, I was thinking just how wonderful it would be if the story continued, and we got to see what happened next. This film doesn’t demand a sequel: it demands a continuation, ending at a place overflowing with as much potential and promise as most beginnings.

8 brawls Viggo wins fighting whilst wearing nothing but a smile without using the most obvious weapon at hand out of 10

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“I'm the driver.” – Eastern Promises.