No matter what you do, your body will bear that mark, be it in the form of a boastful tattoo, an unplanned pregnancy or an unforeseen attack that leaves the body brutally mutilated. These are the lessons taught by the 2007 David Cronenberg film Eastern Promises, which was recently released on DVD.
Starring Viggo Mortensen and Naomi Watts, Eastern Promises dims down the stars’ glamour and places them each, as outsiders in their own right, into the gritty world of London’s crime-filled underbelly, where nothing is as it appears. Throughout the feature, a continual series of facades crumble to show the loathsome depths of human behavior.
Opening with a bloody beginning, a man’s throat is viciously carved open as he naively sits in a barber’s chair, jovially joking with the man who planned his untimely demise. The brutality of this scene effortlessly fades to show a teenage girl- barefoot, bloody and pleading for help- give birth on the floor of a sterile pharmacy’s fluorescent-lit aisle. The young girl dies in childbirth and Anna, the midwife at the local hospital (played with remarkable humility by Watts), embarks on a well-intentioned journey to find her next of kin.
Though they initially appear unrelated, the two deaths coalesce into a singular bloody preamble, leading the audience to the same family of Russian emigrants. Using dead girl’s diary, Watts is led to the family’s upscale Russian restaurant, where the owner, Semyon (Russian native Armin Mueller-Stahl) runs more than just the kitchen. Drawn to Semyon’s family’s immaculately groomed chauffer Nikolai (Mortensen), Anna is unintentionally drawn into a world of lies, deceit and broken hope.
Each character in this film is a human façade built upon painful pasts and buried secrets. Anna- who seems almost shamed by her own Russian heritage- pursues her quest to find the child’s family with unrelenting fervor due to the fact that she has lost one of her own. Semyon, the Russian restaurant owner, uses his pleasant demeanor and soft-spoken charm to cover the fact that he is one of the coldest characters in recent years to light the screen.
After uncovering the secrets of the dead teenage mother, Anna’s only hope comes from Nikolai, a character whose loyalty to his criminal bosses threatens to overshadow his sometimes moral tendencies. Throughout the movie, I fiercely wanted to believe in the hidden righteousness of his character, as he does things that are tainted with goodness, such as freeing a prostitute after he rapes her. However, I found myself wondering if his redeeming qualities could possibly even up to- let alone outweigh- his many unblinkingly heinous deeds.
A Cronenberg alum, Mortensen’s Nikolai is a complex character who hides his litany of tattoos under his long-sleeved Armani suits. These tattoos, replicas of those on actual Russian criminals, provide a visual list documenting Nikolai’s criminal behavior. Each Mark of Cain boasts a separate point of pride, from documenting stints in Russian prisons to identifying rank within crime families.
But the fact that each character is a multi-faceted being- neither wholly good nor evil- is part of why Cronenberg has created such a masterpiece with Eastern Promises. Even Semyon’s son, who is an unforgivable bastard throughout, cannot bring himself to be wholly evil when charged with exterminating the dead teenager’s baby. He desperately cries at the riverbank, holding the child in his hands. “We don’t kill children,” Nikolai whispers to him, though just scenes before he could be seen nonchalantly puffing on a cigarette as he stripped a dead body of its identifiable teeth and fingers.
Rife with breathtaking cinematography and complex visual duality, Cronenberg manages to execute an unforgettable and horrifically astounding scene, wherein Nikolai is attacked in a sauna. Utterly naked except for his tattoos, he must fight two men with knives, who have come to exact revenge. Blood and sweat commingle in the steamy sauna as Nikolai fights for his life from the epitome of vulnerability. Completely void of sensuality, the naked Nikolai instead represents the basest desperation of a human to survive.
Tags: David Cronenberg, Eastern Promises, Naomi Watts, Viggo Mortensen
