Eastern Promises

Eastern Promises
Director : David Cronenberg
Cast :

Viggo Mortenson, Naomi Watts, Vincet Cassel, Armin Mueller-Stahl.


Just as the shivering ghost of Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather hovers over the gruesome opening barbershop murder in David Cronenberg’s impressive, if flawed, London-set mafia thriller, so can you can detect the influence of Paul Schrader in the samurai-ethics of its novitiate hero, Nikolai (an outstanding Viggo Mortensen), a chauffeur with useful taxidermy skills, whose formidable forbearance and steely-strength mark him out as a man of ambitions. Good influences on a great director, undoubtedly; but as Cronenberg’s thoughtful, atmospheric, meticulously-directed and slyly analytical film progresses – and as Nik becomes torn between his feelings for feisty midwife Anna (Naomi Watts) and duty to boss Semyon (Armin Muller-Stahl) whom she enlists to translate the diary of a dead Russian prostitute – it’s magpie intelligence make your body ache for shots of pure Cronenberg.

When they come – and they do, not least in the sordid symphony of slips, steel, blood and bare-flesh Cronenberg choreographs Nikolai doing gut-wrenchingly realistic battle with Chechen rivals on the wet tiles of Finsbury baths – it’s a pleasurable shock. It’s fascinating to watch Cronenberg apply his uniquely transgressive, dualist gaze to the Thameside alleys, velveteen private clubs and the psychological battles and shady internecine struggles of old and new Londoners. But his is a morally-complex vision seemingly at odds with that of the script provided by Steve Knight, whose penchant for mechanistic and self-cancelling moral correspondences and ambiguities provides a birth for every death, for every racial, social or moral presumption, a clever qualification, reversal or inversion. The marriage of the two minds – the one fissive, the other more domesticated and politically correct – has produced a slightly hesitant, slightly undercharacterised and gently compromising, hybrid: an oddly diplomatic dip into the demi-mondes lurking behind London doorways, lacks either the immersive compulsion of his first London film Spider or the graphic power of his similarly-themed A History of Violence. Yet, Eastern Promises offers something new and intriguing from Cronenberg, an ironic but undeniably romantic comment on the uncertain return on moral capital.