Promises kept

Cronenberg’s latest is quiet but powerful

Mark Holcomb

Bless David Cronenberg. Whenever one of his films registers with the public enough to achieve something like commercial success, he’s apt to make a 180-degree turn and follow it up with a trickier, typically more personal project. Hence 1988’s morbid true-crime melodrama Dead Ringers appeared on the heels (claws?) of his 1986 monster-flick crowd-pleaser The Fly, and itself led to the all-but-impenetrable Naked Lunch (1991).

In that vein, this sedate social-problem tone poem both elaborates on and veers away from the themes the director explored in 2005’s astonishing A History of Violence. And if Eastern Promises mutes its predecessor’s heady mix of pulp-fiction plotting, Christian allegory and scathing political commentary in favor of Euro-Gothic contemplativeness, it nevertheless makes for an intriguing companion piece.

Written by Steven Knight and similar in its concerns to his 2002 Dirty Pretty Things (as well as to Lukas Moodysson’s soul-scouring Lilya 4-ever from that same year), Eastern Promises’ story both runs counter to and dovetails with Cronenberg’s visual preoccupations. Like Violence, it follows the path of a crime-syndicate apostate, only this time as a means of exposing the horrors endured by a marginalized segment of London’s growing population from the former Soviet states. Nikolai (the ever-intense Viggo Mortensen), a chauffeur and prodigiously tattooed enforcer for the vory v zakone (essentially the Russian mafia as re-formed in Stalin’s prison camps), crosses paths with an English midwife of Russian descent, Anna (Naomi Watts, who gets to use something like her real accent for a switch), when she begins to investigate the paternity of a baby girl she delivered. The infant’s mother, an abused teenager who died in childbirth, left behind a diary that Anna’s uncle (filmmaker and playwright Jerzy Skolimowski) only agrees to translate after Anna has already sought the help of restaurateur Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl)—a Russian-ex-pat-community bigwig more deeply involved with the young girl than anyone can guess, and whose courtly manner masks true brutality. To close the circle, Semyon’s lily-livered lout of a son, Kirill (Vincent Cassel), is Nikolai’s boss and friend (and possibly much more).

The outright appeal to morality in Eastern Promises’ screenplay represents new territory for Cronenberg, and may come as a shock to his followers. Yet the combination somehow works. The director’s sedate, meticulous aestheticism keeps the story’s inflammatory subject matter—the global sex trade—from tipping over into unpleasant exploitation, while Knight’s conscience-driven specificity gives Cronenberg something new with which to work (and helps rein in his more outre impulses).

Still, and happily, the director’s formal preoccupations take center stage. Even heavier on the religioso imagery than the last third of Violence, the tableaux here (beautifully composed by Cronenberg’s longtime cinematographer, Peter Suschitzky) have the distinct flavor of Russian icons, just as the carefully modulated unraveling of the narrative’s various snares—one of Eastern Promises’ real pleasures, since as a thriller it pivots more on seething menace than genuine thrills—has the feel of ritual.

Even a violent midfilm set piece plays out as a rite of passage and isn’t immune to the overall meditativeness.

Fans can take heart, though: Bodies still erupt in David Cronenberg movies, and this one is no exception. The extended central brawl involving Nikolai and a pair of vengeful brothers recalls both the grisly, gristly mayhem in A History of Violence and—talk about body horror—the wrestling scene in Borat.

Eastern Promises

***

Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Vincent Cassel

Directed by David Cronenberg

Rated R

Opens Friday

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