Eastern Promises

I had a chance, this weekend, to visit Vancouver and catch some new films. (This is an inevitable consequence of living in a small rural community - you usually have to wait for DVD to see new releases other than big Hollywood crap.) One of these was David Cronenberg's new film Eastern Promises, which, if my opinion means anything to anyone, is an absolutely unmissable effort by the greatest working Canadian director.

A woman walks into a London drugstore late at night, pregnant, pleading for help in broken English. Below her is a pool of blood. She is taken to a hospital, where she is assigned a midwife named Anna (played by Naomi Watts), who, along with doctors, manages to save her baby, but not her. Anna makes it her mission to discover this woman's story, a process that leads her to a Russian restaurant owned and operated by Mr. Semyon (played masterfully by Armin Mueller-Stahl). Semyon knew Anna's father (she is a second-generation Russian immigrant), and treats her warmly, offering to translate from Russian the diary of the dead woman. But all is not right at his restaurant. Shady characters, including his uncouth, violent son Kirill (French superstar Vincent Cassel) seem to populate the street outside. Most mysterious of all is Kirill's "driver", a cold, spare, sinister Russian named Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen, in the performance of his career).

To reveal more of the plot is to rob you of the genuine pleasures of allowing its various twists and turns to unfold, but it's not hard to see that the Russian mafia plays a role in the film, and Anna is drawn into a dangerous world, with dangerous people. And that Nikolai... there's something about him...

Cronenberg's films are all about identity and transformation, and Eastern Promises is no exception. No one in this film is who they seem at first blush, except perhaps Anna's mother and uncle, who sensibly warn her to stop this relentless search for the dead girl's identity. Some of their hesitation comes from what her Russian uncle reads in the diary. It's not pleasant.

The other Cronenberg signature is his penchant for violence and gore, although in this film and its companion piece, A History of Violence, the gore is used to good, not excessive effect. You make think that hyperbole after seeing the film, but pause for a moment to consider Cronenberg's motivation. Violence is disturbing. It should be upsetting. I would rather see the real consequences of something like a knife fight (featured in a scene guaranteed to become a classic, set in a Turkish bath) then see some action hero jump from jet fighter to moving car, taking plate glass to the face without so much as a bruise. Cronenberg shows it, all of it, to his credit. Violence shouldn't be exciting. It's not pleasant.

For all that unpleasantness, the film achieves a transcendental quality by ultimately pushing all of its plot-related intricacies and gory violence aside and finally settling on a profoundly human exploration of the nature of identity and morality. Far more haunting an effective than A History of Violence (a great movie in itself), Eastern Promises goes deep, and the final scene (and words) linger in the imagination. It may well be Cronenberg's masterpiece.