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Eastern Promises (2007)

Director: David Cronenberg

Time Out rating

Average user rating

20 reviews

Synopsis

David Cronenberg re-teams with his ‘History of Violence’ star Viggo Mortensen for this London-set tale of the Russian Mafia, revolving around the sex trade. Extensive location shooting has included Hackney’s Broadway Market and the old Middlesex Hospital.

Movie review

From Time Out London

Just as the shivering ghost of Coppola’s ‘Godfather’ hovers over the gruesome opening barbershop murder in 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 lowly chauffeur with useful taxidermy skills, whose formidable forbearance, shaded tact and steely-strength mark him out as a man of yet-unfulfilled 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 deceptively-bonhomous 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 as the now-promoted ‘vory’ does 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 ‘Dirty Pretty Things’ 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 pc – has produced a slightly hesitant, slightly undercharacterised and gently compromising, hybrid: an oddly diplomatic, if often brutal, dip into the hellish demi-mondes lurking behind bouncer-guarded London doorways, which while lacking either the immersive compulsion of his first ‘London’ film ‘Spider’ or the clarity and graphic power of his similarly-themed ‘A History of Violence’, offers something quite new and intriguing from Cronenberg, an ironic but undeniably romantic comment on the uncertain return on moral capital, an achievement that would have been inconceivable without Mortensen’s extraordinary central performance.

Author: Wally Hammond 2007-10-09 14:28:51

Time Out London Issue 1940: October 23-29 2007

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User reviews of this film

joe said...

Posted on Oct 29 2007 11:27 This is a great film and intelligently done.

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Christopher Levett said...

Posted on Oct 27 2007 23:51 It felt somehow too English - convenient resolutions conspiring to smooth over what ought to have been complex developments. But there were some lovely bits of visceral Cronenberg: the Finsbury baths scene and the way he deals with the baby taking her first breaths, Mortensen is good - the whole film hangs on him - but the ambiguity of his character just isn't ambiguous enough, and the image of Anna and Nicolai on her old motorcycle dashing through the London night seemed rooted in more innocent times.

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Bob said...

Posted on Oct 27 2007 13:43 I preferred Steve Knight's ‘Dirty Pretty Things’ Cronenberg's ‘Spider’ and ‘A History of Violence’. There was a little too much of Borat in Vincent Cassel's character. Nevertheless, worth seeing if you have a strong stomach.

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Alison C said...

Posted on Oct 20 2007 10:03 Eastern Promises took top billing at the BFI London Film Festival for very good reasons. A gritty tale set in a London not often shown on the big screen and with a robust cast to deliver scenes of passion together with some trademark David Cronenberg art-house gore. There's something for everyone in this film: blood, beatings and underground tales, a dirty bedroom scene, a lesson in love and morality and Viggo Mortensen naked.

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melinda Frohen said...

Posted on Aug 09 2007 20:40 Have seen only bits&pieces , the film looks great, a frind of mine worked for the set and I have been able to see some edited pieces! The food looks just stunning! The light, the film is shot, just surreal, is this our London!? Only Cronenberg can make this happened. The film feels very Russian in places.

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