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All Movie Info
Starring:
Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Watts, Vincent Cassel, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Sinéad Cusack, Donald Sumpter, Morne Botes, Tamer Hassan, Peter Rnic, Michael Sarne, Jerzy Skolimowski, Badi Uzzaman, Richard Waller, Gergo Danka, Mina E. Mina, Tereza Srbova, Josef Altin, Josef Altin, Andrzej Borkowski, Cristina Catalina, Alice Henley, Boris Isarov, Raza Jaffrey, Yuri Klimov, Sarah-Jeanne Labrosse, Elisa Lasowski, Liam McKenna, Igor Outkine David Papava, Rebecca Reid, Brice Stratford, Olegar Fedoro, Faton Gerbeshi, Radoslaw Kaim, Ksenia Lavrentieva, Aleksandar Mikic, Mia Soteriou
Directed By:
David Cronenberg
Written By:
Steven Knight
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Eastern Promises (2007)
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Movie Review by Ezra
October 5th, 2007
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EASTERN PROMISES
Eastern Promises is the latest film from one of my all-time favorite directors, David Cronenberg (Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers). As was true of his last film, 2005's A History of Violence, Promises is more a meditation on violence than anything else. Ostensibly, it is an old school mobster movie with a heart.
A London midwife named Anna (Naomi Watts) delivers a baby girl whose mother, a 14-year-old prostitute, dies in the birth. Anna, wanting to protect the baby, takes a special interest in the case after salvaging the young woman's diary, which leads her to London branch of the Russian mob fraternity vory v zakone (thieves in law), including its leader Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), his son Kirill (Vincent Cassel), and their "driver" Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen), who actually handles a lot of the criminal business with which Kirill is charged. It is Nikolai who helps Anna in her quest to find the truth about the child and, in the process, to bring Semyon down.
The scenes involving the mob's business, rites and initiations are the strongest parts of the film. There is an innate authenticity in the performances, as well as the way the film is shot by long-time Cronenberg collaborater Peter Suchitzky (1988's Dead Ringers to present). The actual story involving Anna and Nikolai is less interesting; Nikolai is really the protagonist of this film, and Mortensen's performance is excellent, which is not to say that Watts (or anyone else, for that matter) is phoning in the performance. The acting and all technical elements in this film are top-notch. The problems are in the script, which lacks the scope of a really classic mobster film like The Godfather or Goodfellas. Still, there is one scene that really outdoes nearly anything in those films: the infamous nude bathhouse fight, in which Nikolai, completely naked and vulnerable, is accosted by two thugs wielding nasty looking knives with curved blades. The choreography and sound design of this scene is absolutely amazing and consummately realistic; I've never seen a fight scene like this, and undoubtedly never will again. The film is worth seeing for this scene alone, but the violence is handled this way throughout: raw and brutal, but never gratuitous or glamorous.
This and Violence are good examples of a cinema master stretching the boundaries of his art into new directions, for better or worse. Like Violence, this will probably be better received by mainstream audiences than long-time Cronenberg fans, but regardless of your level of fandom, this is an impressive film that deserves attention on many levels.
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