Eastern Promises

Star Viggo Mortensen and director David Cronenberg reteam for this alternative musing on the same thoughts behind their 2005 film A History of Violence (which I saw but apparently forget to write up here). Maybe it’s the improvement from having done this before, changing the setting from rural America to London’s urban core, that the sympathetic innocent is Naomi Watts rather than Mortensen, or that the capacity for violence of Mortensen’s character is not ever concealed, but I prefer Eastern Promises to the first movie. Maybe Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things) is just a better writer than Josh Olson.

A teenage girl, who speaks no English, dies giving birth to a daughter and a hospital midwife called Anna Khitrova (Watts) takes home the girl’s diary looking for clues to her identity. The writing seems to be Russian and Anna’s uncle Stepan is a Russian emigre, but he and her mother give her grief about it so she goes to the restaurant whose card was inside the diary.

There Anna meets Semyon (Armin Muller-Stahl), the owner, who agrees to take a look at the photocopy of the diary. He’s also, it turns out, patriarch of a family which belongs to the Vory V Zakone, a Russian mafia variant, and the girl was a prostitute who belonged to him. Nikolai Luhzin (Mortensen) is one of his soldiers, working for Semyon’s son Kirill (Vincent Cassell, familiar to US audiences as Clooney’s rival thief The Fox in the Ocean’s 11 movies), though he introuces himself to the pretty Anna as “just a driver.”

Just as in History of Violence, family is the fulcrum on which all else balances. Semyon and Kirill bring Nikolai into theirs–during the scene where he becomes a ‘made’ man the Vory V Zakon leaders insult Nikolai’s real parents and require that he renounce them–and Anna risks not only her own safety but her family’s as well.

The plot is dense, much of it delivered through the emotional tones of the actors’ performances and Knight supplies a number of twists that elevate Promises above the philosophical trap into which Cronenberg might have easily been snared. Plus, you need to remember this is a David Cronenberg movie and that means you won’t walk out without a shuddering over a few gruesome scenes; here he uses throat cuttings, perhaps attempting through repetition to push through the instinctive disgust to find a deeper meaning.

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