Eastern Promises - Review

David Cronenberg, 2007

Still reveling in body horror, the excess of human behaviour, the perverse and the profane, Cronenberg has rightly earned his international reputation as an astute director and auteur. Learning his trade with a string of low-budget horror films, in which intelligent and genuinely shocking images awed audiences time after time, Cronenberg has escaped being pigeon-holed by working in other genres with relative ease; mostly with successful results. Following on for the widespread success of A History of Violence; his 2005 film about a one man's attempt to hide from his violent past, Eastern Promises again establishes his versatility and touches on the themes he's explored for the past 35 years.

Set in a murky underworld of London, focusing on a Russian contingent dealing in the sex-slave trade, Eastern Promises paints a dark and disturbing world of cheap lives and organised crime. London is covered in a permanent film of gloom, penetrated rarely with the odd glimpse of sun, with rain-strewn streets, looming shadows and confined, low shot interiors and exteriors, giving the feel of a city trapped in its own squalidness. London has rarely looked this miserable. In the midst of this hopelessness and misery enters Anna (Naomi Watts), a pediatric nurse, working at a London hospital, who happens to help save a premature baby but unfortunately not the young, badly beaten, 14 year old mother, who had previously staggered into the building, hemorrhaging heavily before passing out.

Anna, having suffered a miscarriage some months before, strikes up a bond with the child, and on finding a diary written by the mother, something she was clutching before she died, Anna decides to track down the nearest relative to the young girl before the child becomes lost in the social care system. In the process of getting the diary translated, from it's original Russian, Anna finds a business card of a restaurant amongst the pages, hoping someone can help her trace the girls family she decides to give the place a visit. The address leads Anna to meet restaurateur Semyon (Armin-Mueller-Stahl), an elderly Russian whose warm welcome masks the horrific part he plays in the poor girls life. In being introduced to Seymon we enter the world of the Vory V Zakone (Russian Mafia); who adorn their bodies with a series of tattoos; symbols that represent their standing in the organisation.

A mystical, almost intense, reference surrounds the adorning of these tattoos for the Vory V Zakone; a series of fierce, colourless symbols, placed in symbolic parts of the body by rank and accomplishment; much like an army officer with a chest full of medals. This is vintage Cronenberg territory; transgression and body transmogrification in full swing. We witness an almost erotic scene in which Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen), in the midst of being tattooed, half naked, lying back, casually smoking a cigarette, is perfectly at one with the needle, the ink almost caressing his body.

Nikolai receiving the totemic tattoos

Despite a first-rate screenwriter, Steven Knight, who also delved into similar territory about the plight of the migrant underclass with a previous script for Dirty Pretty Things (2002), plus the huge talent of Cronenberg, all too often the film feels clunky, cluttered and bereft of drama. The casting for instance is something of a puzzler, casting an Australian as a Brit and using a Frenchman and an American as Russian gangsters, whose accents from time to time wander into stereotype land, something that began to grate towards the end of the film; the biggest sinner being Vincent Cassel playing Seymon's son Kirill, often too big and too bombastic, his character soon becomes archetypal and clichéd. Mortensen on the other hand plays Nikolia with powerful, understated menace, a peruser of carnage who could, from the look of him, either hug you or rip off your head.

Surprisingly, for Cronenberg, Eastern Promises feels muted, understated, lacking in depth and missing his bold brush strokes. Scenes of greatness flicker sporadically and moments of sheer horror; a scene in which Nikolia clips the fingers off a corpse or that first opening murder, are few and far between. So it's with annoyance, rather than celebration, that we witness one of Cronenberg's finest moments; Nikolia's naked fight, with two fully dressed assassins in a public bath-house. This amazing scene, honest in his brutality and fierceness, feels like it sprung out of a different film, such stark and brave film-making feels so out of place in this otherwise turgid, plodding tale.

Nikolai with Anna (Naomi Watts)

It's unfortunate that Eastern Promises fails to deliver, as there are times when you feel it's going to spark into life but all in all it just comes down to fleeting moments and ideas; often it feels and plays out like a TV movie. There's a real lack of substance to this film and added to the poor narrative is a plot-twist, as unnecessary as it is insulting, that adds nothing to the story and seems like a cop-out. Eastern Promises proves to be one of those films that despite all the elements being right; stellar cast, talented script writer, influential maverick director and a story, peppered and ready for the taking, fails to hit the target on nearly all fronts.