Film review: Eastern Promises

Despite the star presence of Viggo Mortensen, David Cronenberg's violent film about the Russian Mafia in London is a disappointment, writes Sukhdev Sandhu

What a treasure trove for filmmakers is contemporary London. There is a Mayor eager to welcome outsiders who might shine a pre-Olympics spotlight on the city he has sought to modernise and re-brand, tax breaks to be had, and even companies that will help scout out and obtain access to its more obscure nooks.

More than that, London is swelling – furiously, fantastically. Its skyline is increasingly engorged, its climate heating up, its economy blasting on all furnaces, its population growing all the time. It's a Wild West of obscene wealth and desperate struggles; a magnet for hucksters, desperadoes and fortune-seekers; a militarised, relentlessly surveillanced police state in the making.

Some British directors, most notably Stephen Frears in Dirty Pretty Things (2002) and Danny Boyle in 28 Days Later… (2002), have been alive to London's strange, dark attractions.

For the most part, though, it's been the work of foreign artists — Jasmin Dizdar's Beautiful People (1999), Patrice Chéreau's Intimacy (2001), Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men (2006), Anja Kirschner's Polly II: Plan for a Revolution in Docklands (2006) — that has offered the best snapshots and evocations of the convulsive, captivating metropolis.

All the more reason, then, to look forward to Eastern Promises, Canadian auteur David Cronenberg's follow-up to his commercially and critically successful A History of Violence (2005), and set in the mean streets and meaner restaurants of Russian-Mafia London.

Who better than the master of look-don't-look body-horror cinema to respond to the everyday savageries spawned by a malformed, excrescent capital?

The film begins with a brutal barbershop scene – in which a retarded teenage boy slashes the throat of a customer – only to get progressively darker and darker.

Naomi Watts plays Anna, an east London midwife who helps deliver the baby of a 14-year-old sex slave called Tatiana. She dies during childbirth and Anna, finding a business card in the teenager's diary, makes it her mission to track down the father of the infant.

She hooks up with Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), a seemingly benign patriarch and restaurant owner who turns out to be the head of Vory V Zakone, a Brezhnev-era clan of thieves, people-traffickers and sharp-steel-wielding thugs.

Anna wants Tatiana's diary translated; Semyon, knowing that it is full of incriminating details about the prison-like cells in which young women are pumped full of drugs and prostituted, wants the diary destroyed, along with anyone who has read its wretched contents.

Immediately vulnerable is Anna, as well as her mother (Sinéad Cusack) and Stepan, her Russian uncle (Jerzy Skolimowski, Lodz-born director of 1982's Moonlighting about three Polish migrants stuck in London).

The film is partly a thriller about whether this decent trio will avoid a violent end. But it's also a more turbulent, psychologically charged account of the power dynamics within Semyon's circle, notably between his alcoholic son Kirill (Vincent Cassel) and his chauffeur, Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen).

Greasy-haired, sad-eyed Kirill is fascinated with his father's mysterious "undertaker", grappling with him in a fashion that moves from drunken camaraderie to pining eroticism.

In one disturbing scene, over which the voice of dead Tatiana is heard reciting entries from her horrible journal, he forces Nikolai to have sex with a prostitute in front of him; his power to do so though is complicated and undermined by the longing he feels to take the girl's place.

Mortensen, alongside the smoothly menacing Mueller-Stahl, is the star of this film. With his shades, thick accent and designer clothes, of which the shirt's collar is so high that his throat is barely visible, he straddles the line between cartoon villain and an inhuman machine somewhere between Max Headroom and Robocop.

The precision of his body gestures and his taut musculature are offset by his ambiguous biography and the weary insouciance with which he sighs at the stupidity of the gangsters around him.

"I am dead already," he says at one point, "I live in that zone." In a city where death seems always to linger in the air, and where the ghosts of unresolved crimes circulate and hover, Nikolai often resembles a slinky zombie.

Eastern Promises struggles to marry this kind of sepulchral ambience and its more pulpy plot elements. That may be due to Cronenberg and screenplay writer Stephen Knight having competing visions of what the film is really about.

Knight, who wrote Dirty Pretty Things and the Abolitionist drama Amazing Grace (2006), is clearly fascinated by the grimy, polycultural elements of the story (its Chechen gangsters, Kurdish mobsters, Asian shopkeepers).

He depicts a London that has virtually seceded from England, a tense, ethnically serrated landscape in which a van sporting the logo "Arthur Clegg — Painting and Decorating" is positively exotic.

Strangely, Cronenberg and cinematographer Peter Suschitzky, who made very good use of the capital's canals, gas works and terraced streets in their previous London-set drama Spider (2002), seem less interested - or at least are less successful at - evoking the feel or mood of its secret geographies here. But it's not clear that they really know what they do want to evoke.

Anna's family set-up doesn't ring true for a second, and the glimmer of a back story she's offered when her uncle announces that she and her black boyfriend had a miscarriage because people of different races aren't meant to mix isn't developed at all.

In fact, all the characters, including Nikolai, are woefully depthless. Cronenberg fans might argue that this, and the rickety, coincidence-laden storyline, doesn't matter, and that he's using them as ciphers.

The problem is that the film's main idea -that the machismo bravura and chest-puffing of the average Mafia member may conceal something other than clear-cut heterosexuality - is hardly a revelation. There is a clunkiness here, dramatic as well as intellectual, that checks rhythm, genuine dynamics, real suspense.

Strangest of all, Cronenberg doesn't even play to his strengths. Given his fascination with anatomy and metastasis, he makes very limited use of the tattoos with which the criminals in the film are emblazoned.

His handling of violent physicality, whether it's a close-up of a bloody baby lying on a floor, the fingers of a corpse being snapped off, a knife in an eye, verges on the gratuitous, and had these scenes been shot by Quentin Tarantino or Eli Roth they would have been dismissed as amoral.

Not wanting to revisit the themes with which he made his name - a wise decision, since "body shock" has become commonplace in the visual arts - Cronenberg seems uncertain about where to go next.

A History of Violence worked - just; but Eastern Promises, which promises so much more than it delivers, proves that there's little mileage left in tinkering around with genre.

Time for a major rethink.

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