Eastern Promises
0
Posted
September 28, 2007 in
Film
David Cronenberg can make a summer afternoon give you the chills. Here, his London is a dead ringer for shadowy Moscow–or Hell. A 14-year-old prostitute and junky has just died in childbirth, leaving plucky midwife Anna (Naomi Watts) with only her diary–written in Russian–as a clue for finding the baby’s next-of-kin. Anna’s promised translator pretends to be a kindly restaurateur (Armin Mueller-Stahl) but is really the UK head of the Russian mafia, and the girl’s pimp, and if he can’t keep Anna ignorant, his doltish son (Vincent Cassel) and stoic chauffeur/executioner Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen) will make her blood run like borscht. As an optimist, Cronenberg is somewhere between a doomsayer and a Iraq War committee, and this unrelenting noir with its flood of vodka and heavy red drapes borrows from the hopeless gangster pictures of the 1930s, where the only glint of a better tomorrow was a blonde angel who’d tempt Jimmy Cagney with redemption. Here, Anna faintly tries to save Nikolai, but it’s a lost cause. With his wicked cheekbones and solid, heavily tattooed body, he’s less a man than a thug titan. Despite his total gorgeousness, a nude fight-for-his-life in a steam room has all the titillation of a butcher throwing down a slab of meat. "I am dead all the time," croaks Nikolai. Loyalty is this world’s only living thing, and it’s fading fast. (Amy Nicholson)
David Cronenberg can make a summer afternoon give you the chills. Here, his London is a dead ringer for shadowy Moscow–or Hell. A 14-year-old prostitute and junky has just died in childbirth, leaving plucky midwife Anna (Naomi Watts) with only her diary–written in Russian–as a clue for finding the baby’s next-of-kin. Anna’s promised translator pretends to be a kindly restaurateur (Armin Mueller-Stahl) but is really the UK head of the Russian mafia, and the girl’s pimp, and if he can’t keep Anna ignorant, his doltish son (Vincent Cassel) and stoic chauffeur/executioner Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen) will make her blood run like borscht. As an optimist, Cronenberg is somewhere between a doomsayer and a Iraq War committee, and this unrelenting noir with its flood of vodka and heavy red drapes borrows from the hopeless gangster pictures of the 1930s, where the only glint of a better tomorrow was a blonde angel who’d tempt Jimmy Cagney with redemption. Here, Anna faintly tries to save Nikolai, but it’s a lost cause. With his wicked cheekbones and solid, heavily tattooed body, he’s less a man than a thug titan. Despite his total gorgeousness, a nude fight-for-his-life in a steam room has all the titillation of a butcher throwing down a slab of meat. "I am dead all the time," croaks Nikolai. Loyalty is this world’s only living thing, and it’s fading fast. (Amy Nicholson)
