EASTERN PROMISES
by Chris Dashiell

Eastern Promises, the latest film from David Cronenberg, is both an impeccably constructed thriller and a drama about the preservation of innocence in a fallen world. Similarities to Cronenberg triumph from last year, A History of Violence (both star Viggo Mortensen as mysterious figures of male ambivalence) may obscure the special qualities of this film. It’s more focused in its genre elements, while equally resonant in its symbolism.

Naomi Watts plays Anna, a midwife in a London hospital who delivers the baby of a Russian immigrant, an abused 14-year-old girl. When the mother dies, Anna uses the girl’s diary that she found in her handbag to try to trace the father. She is half-Russian herself, and previously lost her own baby, so there’s an emotional factor involved in the search that she may only partly acknowledge to herself. A business card found in the diary leads her to a Russian restaurant owned by an older man named Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl). What Anna unfortunately doesn’t know is that Semyon is a chief in the Russian mob, and his offer to translate the diary masks his intention to get his hands on it at any cost.

We are then introduced into this shady Russian underworld, which includes Semyon’s violently unstable son, Kiril (Vincent Cassell), and Kiril’s enigmatic chauffeur and bodyguard Nikolai (Mortensen.) What follows is a series of deadly games that threaten to engulf Anna and the newborn child.

Nikolai, whose brutal hardness is blended with sarcasm and a strange sort of charm, becomes the center of the film, eventually picked by Semyon to be one of his soldiers. Mortensen is sensational in the part, fully convincing as a Russian ex-convict, and this proves once and for all that he’s not just some handsome guy from The Lord of the Rings. Cassell is also great in the role of the volatile Kiril, trying to hide his weakness behind a mask of cruelty and bravado. He manages to make his vile character’s conflicted adoration for Nikolai pathetic and touching. Watts’ character is pivotal, but not as complex as the others—she keeps an even keel as the strong-willed Anna, a woman with more courage than good sense. There’s also a clever turn by Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski as Anna’s gruff and insensitive uncle, who sees trouble coming before she does but can’t do anything to prevent it.

Eastern Promises, shot from an original script by Steve Knight, vibrates with symbolism and polarity, as in the opening Christmas Eve sequences features a gang murder and the birth of a child, or in the way the dead mother’s voiceover narration of her diary complements the dark machinations of the Russian gangsters. Yet the film is never bombastic or pretentious, there’s never a wasted shot or line of dialogue, and the overall effect is subdued. There is some very graphic violence, including a fight scene in a bath house that practically sets a new action standard in movies, but this is all part of the intended emotional effect, not a bid for shock value. The film’s bizarre and extraordinary events are somehow conveyed as ordinary, almost normal, and indeed one of the director’s recurring ideas is to question the very notion of what “normal” is. Eastern Promises is a film of accomplished, deliberate artistry, with a sense of compassion that is earned through a passage through the darkest of nights.