Eastern Promises (2007)

Eastern Promises

I liked this movie but... I thought it was very interesting and action movie. when the movie ended I looked at my kids and said. Is that it? I don't recomend it for children under 13. it's mostly for adults. There's nudity and violence. Some secenes toward the end it made my oldest son turn his head.And he's 22. August 28, 2008

Eastern Promises: Mafia mystique unmasked

By Richard Costa

What do a newborn baby girl, a dead teenage prostitute; a mid-wife and a driver for the Russian mob have in common?
They are all caught in the web of `Eastern Promises.'David Cronenberg's latest study of human violence has all the edge you expect from a taut suspense thriller. Viggo Mortensen's character (Nikolai) is a driver for a criminal organization in what should be a bit part that proves instead to be very significant, strange and ambiguous. The film shows the Russian mafia in all its dark glory. Viewers get a glimpse beneath the mystique of the mafia sans the positive spin that's been trailing mob films since the Godfather made it good to be bad. Tony Soprano became a cultural father figure because of his no-nonsense tough guy character, but when you see what his world is built around you suspect he's a devil. So too, Armin Mueller Stahl's Semyon, a paternal, world wise criminal ruler of the Russian underworld in London, seems the kindest elderly gentleman you'd want to meet at first sight when he's introduced in the film. But the fault line in Semyon's public persona grows into a chasm when the newborn baby in question has the power to alter his fate. Behind his genteel veneer lay a world of human trafficking and death.
The story begins with a girl of fourteen (Tatiana) giving birth in a London hospital. She dies during the birth and leaves nothing but her diary, written in Russian. Her midwife Anna (Naomi Watts) seeks to have the diary translated to find the newborn girl's kin. She finds a business card which brings her to a restaurant where she meets the seeming gentleman and restaurateur Mueller-Stahl (Semyon). He claims no recollection of the girl. Anna naively asks if he would read the diary. His interest piques when he learns of the diary, and so Watts has given valuable information to the devil. Other characters and subplots intersect--including Viggo Mortensen's relationship to both patriarch Semyon and his twitchy son Kirill, played by Vincent Cassel.
Vory V Zakone is Russian for `Thieves in-law.' The unique code for criminals in prison camps flourished in the Stalin era. Thieves in-law are sworn to forego everything, including family, for fealty to their fellow thieves. Their power increased when the Soviet Union fell apart. Modern Russia is a complex portrait of relationships between the government, the Vory and white collar criminals. In the film, when the Russian mafia moves to London, the criminal code goes with them. The Vory V Zakone are well known for their tattoos; in fact they're ranked by them. As a detective inspecting a dead body remarks in the film: `In Russian prisons, your life story is written on your body in tattoos. Without tattoos, you don't exist.'
Once fourteen year-old Tatiana dies in the hospital with needle marks on her arms after escaping Semyon's sex slave trade, we get a caption from her diary: `I am not sure I can carry on another day. The windows won't open, so I cannot throw myself out. They inject me every day with heroin. Sometimes, I think this is all an hallucination.' Anna's Russian-born Uncle wants her to destroy the diary, while her mother Helen says of the criminal organization: `They're like a contagious disease, there's no cure once they've touched you.'
As Nikolai, Mortsen's accent is perfect, complete with missing articles from his speech for effect. His ambiguity is complimented by Anna's innocence. The underworld meets civilization in their encounters throughout the film. Watts compelling presence radiates the screen like it did in King Kong (she was the blockbusters strongest asset), and Mueller Stahl's duplicitous performance will haunt you long after you leave the theater. Eastern Promises has sexual situations, a now famous nude fight scene in a sauna, graphic violence and very adult situations.


Richard Costa
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August 21, 2008

Cronenberg as Thriller Director, Part II

Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, 2007)

Film critic Jim Emerson has said that the central fight scene in Eastern Promises is "sure to go down as a raw, brutal, and pulse-pounding landmark in the history of fight scenes....If a fight scene doesn't make you feel like you're a part of it, so that it quickens your heartbeat and your breathing, then it's a failure." (Scanners, Sept. 10, 2007) And yes, Eastern Promises joins that very small list of modern movies-- They Live, Girlfight, Fight Club-- that will give you a bloody nose just watching them. (Oddly, I haven't seen anyone comparing the fight scene in Eastern Promises to its obvious cognate in A History of Violence, the infamous scene on the stairs.) Looking at the fight, by itself, is a good way to drive into the core of David Cronenberg's genius, the uncanny ability to unnerve us with the body that he's displayed in the thirty-two years between his first big-screen production, Shivers, and now. Cronenberg is an auteur of bodily horror; even if he seems to have retired from the explicitly-gross genre after the beautiful, underrated eXistenZ and gone into the more mainstream thriller, these scenes have the same effect, albeit more muted, than the shocking birth scene of The Brood or the head explosion in Scanners: scenes that are no less shocking thirty years later, despite so many pale imitations, and despite our tolerance as a culture for movie violence being so much higher than it was in the late seventies.

Eastern Promises is, at its heart, a love story, just as A History of Violence was before it (and, for that matter, as The Brood was before that). It starts when Russian gangster Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen, whose penchant for accents never fails to amaze me) meets Anna (Naomi Watts), a midwife who discovers the diary of a woman who died in childbirth and wants to return it to the woman's family. The contents of the diary, when translated, tie the leader of the gang Mortensen's working to the child. After finding out Anna's Russian uncle read the diary, the gang leader (Armin Mueller-Stahl) orders the uncle killed, and the thriller part of the film begins. But-- and this is odd for a Cronenberg film-- the thriller plot almost takes a backseat to the relationship between Nikolai and Anna, who are so obviously meant for one another and, of course, can't be together.

Ah, but then there's the fight scene, which is at best tangential, but during which Cronenberg's body horror resuscitates itself and comes roiling to the fore. The actors themselves did the entire scene, no stuntmen, and if the sound effects were later overdubbed, they were overdubbed with the actual sounds of fists on flesh, which are so notably absent (replaced by more dramatic sound effects) from so many other films. It's the fight scene that shows us Cronenberg's attention to detail and passion for realism in his films, even when those films are far beyond the bounds of the real. It's these things that made me see films such as Scanners and Videodrome as successes, back when I first saw them (and, still, today; Scanners sits high on my list of the best movies ever made). And when you take such a philosophy and put it into a film that actually realistic, how can you not come up with a winner?

The movie does everything Hollywood doesn't. It's tense without consciously creating tension, dramatic without consciously creating drama. It's a love story that has no love whatsoever in it, just two people who are civil to one another when they should by rights be clawing each other's eyes out. How it can work, and work so very well, is something Hollywood has forgotten, and it's why I find myself liking so many foreign films better than their Hollywood cognates. (Eastern Promises, done by a Canadian director and filmed entirely on location in London, written by a British guy, is foreign enough to count as foreign, for the purposes of this discussion.) Those of you who previously dismissed Cronenberg as a horror director, it's time to go back and re-evaluate his new career as a director of crime thrillers; perhaps, once you see what he's on about here, you'll find yourself with a great deal more appreciation for what he did in his older movies. ****

August 19, 2008

Subdued, Intense, Fast-Paced

I really enjoyed Viggo Mortensen in David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, so when I heard they were teaming up again for Eastern Promises, I had very high expectations.

Eastern Promises offers a powerfully subdued yet intense performance by Viggo Mortensen as a Russian driver/enforcer working his way up London's most notorious Russian crime family. Mortensen has proven himself a chameleon with the roles he's chosen of late, and I had no trouble accepting him as a merciless, cold, calculating--and oddly charming--criminal.

The premise of the story seems straightforward on the surface, but there are some complex developments that caught me unawares. Essentially Naomi Watts, a hospital worker, is trying to track down relation for a baby recently born to a teenage Russian prostitute who died during labor. All she has is a diary written in Russian, which, as fate would have it, leads her right to the door of the Russian mob and Viggo Mortensen. Watts finds herself intertwined in an alien world, ultimately putting the baby in more danger than she ever could have realized.

Cronenberg delivers a compelling and utterly realistic film delving into a topic I found completely original. I've never seen much involving the Russian mafia, especially one based in London, so there was nothing familiar to me about this movie. I'm certain that's one of the many reasons I enjoyed it so much.

There are moments of potent violence in Eastern Promises, but they are brief and not as frequent as you might expect. The psychological tension is palpable in this film, and that's what will have you on the edge of your seat more so than any bloodshed.

I would, however, be remiss to avoid discussing the infamous bathhouse knife fight. Yes, Viggo Mortensen displays extreme devotion to his character by recording a scene totally nude as men attack him with knives in a bathhouse. I suppose if you hit pause you could see everything you wanted to know about Mortensen, but it all happens so fast and the camera work is so sporadic that the viewer sees nothing more than glimpses and blurs. I can't imagine getting tossed around on tile floors like that without any sort of ... well, you know. Mortensen is definitely willing to take one for the team and suffer for his art.

Eastern Promises moved at an incredibly fast pace and the tense storyline and character-driven acting impressed me to no end. I had high expectations for this film, and they were exceeded.

~Scott William Foley, author of The Imagination's Provocation: Volume I: A Collection of Short Stories August 9, 2008

With the Cronenberg touch

For whereas "A History of Violence" was relevant, horrifying, masterful, suspenseful and haunting (staying in your mind long after its end; getting under your very nerves even), "Eastern Promises" is merely a passable story served up with the Cronenberg touch. Its ending even felt a little incomplete to me, a few elements unexplained (and not in a good, open-ended way). But against all other contenders out there this season, it's worth a look August 4, 2008

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