I Would Like to See It: Eastern Promises

Eastern Promises opens with a barber forcing his developmentally disabled son to kill a Russian gangster in the middle of a haircut. It’s a heart-rending moment, this callous man’s brutality toward his child, his impatience with the young man’s fear and hesitation, and then the grotesque physicality of the act itself. Another director might have had the actor draw his straight razor swiftly across the gangster’s throat, but this is Cronenberg: the kid saws at the guy’s vocal cords and trachea like he’s re-sizing a sheet of particle board. This emotionally stunted relationship model recurs throughout the film. Anna’s racist, boorish uncle, Kirill’s outwardly genteel and privately abusive father, Kirill himself internalizing and replicating his father’s homophobic cruelty; Eastern Promises dwells at length and with canny, unromantic intensity on the nature of family bonds and personal identity both ethnic and sexual.

It’s this lack of tragic grandeur or romantic antiheroism that makes Cronenberg’s strange little mob thriller hit so hard. Its big action set piece is Viggo Mortenson’s Nikolai, buck naked, fighting tooth and nail against two Chechen hit men in a sauna while a bunch of old Russian guys in towels freak out in the background. Mortenson isn’t once shot from a heroic angle, made to look imposing or in control. He scrambles over the tiled floor like a roach, his dick and balls flop around when he aims a kick at one of his attackers, and the killing strokes themselves are ugly, desperate, and inelegant. The only other notably violent scene involves Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl) kicking his drunken son Kirill (Vincent Cassel) in a fit of petty irritation. The rest is threats and cleanup, including an intricate application of classic Cronenberg prosthetics during the disassembly of a body. The stumps of a half-frozen corpse’s clipped fingers look horribly real, a ghoulish cross between taffy and hamburger.

Speaking of threats, Cronenberg and veteran editor Ronald Sanders pay close attention to the non-verbal language of their performers. It’s an effective way to show the viewer how emotionally malformed the film’s men are, defaulting to veiled implications of violence at the least inconvenience, unable to do or discuss anything without constantly asserting their own dominance, even when it runs counter to their goals. That it’s Naomi Watts’s big-eyed, hugely expressive face opposite Mortenson’s wolfish reserve and Cassel’s vulpine, playful mutability doesn’t hurt, but even so there’s an incredible precision to the way the camera follows an emotion’s transmission from body to body, an unusually crisp quality to the action-reaction flow of the simplest dialogue. Even without the pulsating tumors and ghastly deformities, Cronenberg understands at a fundamental level the ways in which human beings live in one another’s bodies. 

Consider the raped and murdered teenage prostitute (Sarah-Jeanne Labrosse, voiced by Tatiana Maslany) whose voice stubbornly refuses to fade from the film, extracts from her diary haunting first Anna and later Nikolai. There is a permanence to the film's acts of violence, to its depictions of loss. Nothing is resolved, not the complex snarl of homoeroticism and bullying, brotherly behavior between Nikolai and Kirill, not the dismal lives of the sex workers in thrall to the Russian vory, but the echoes of these things remain. Even in the film's final moments it is Tatiana's words that hang over the image of Nikolai ascended to the heights of power. "That's why I came here," she says bitterly of London. "To find a better life."