Eastern Promises

A brutal tale of Russian gangsters, murder and sexual slavery in East London. Directed by David Cronenberg and starring Viggo Mortensen and Naomi Watts
Director David Cronenberg has long been slated to adapt Martin Amis's novel 'London Fields', a tale of sexual obsession, imminent apocalypse and darts set in West London and not in the area of east London known as London Fields from which it takes its title. Ironically the film Cronenberg has made in lieu of the Amis adaptation, Eastern Promises, is set in London Fields, a patch of parkland in Hackney which abuts Broadway Market. It is down that market where the opening brutal execution of this underworld thriller occurs, a razor to the windpipe that provides our entr??e into a demi-monde of Ukrainian, Chechen and Russian mobsters. The underworld has moved on since Amis wrote 'London Fields' in 1989. If Cronenberg was weighing up these two projects, trying to decide which one to plump for, then the twenty-first century milieu of Eastern Promises was the right choice. Screenwriter Steve Knight shows us the transformation of the London criminal scene by the arrival of the Russian Mafia, specifically the organisation known as Vory V Zakone. Hackney was once carved up between the crews drawn from the Irish, the Caribbean and the Turkish community, each specialising in a particular drug (ecstasy and cannabis, cocaine and crack, and heroin respectively), an uneasy order upset by the arrival of the well-armed, disciplined gangs from the former Soviet Union. Viggo Mortensen plays driver and aspiring foot soldier Nikolai Luzhin with an expansive civility and a matter-of-fact brutality. Accompanying his captain Kirill (Casell) to the scene of the opening murder, he has to dispose of the victim stored in a freezer. Wearily, he asks for a hairdryer so he can defrost the dead man's jacket to extract his wallet. Then he sets about snipping off the fingertips of the corpse and removing its teeth - and this is our hero? Our heroine is midwife Anna, played by Naomi Watts. She is drawn into the Russian underworld after a young girl called Tatiana (Labrosse) stumbles into a pharmacy, clutching at her swollen womb as blood drips around her feet. Rushed to hospital, Tatiana dies giving birth to a baby girl. She leaves a diary. In search of the girl's family, Anna decides to have Tatiana's diary translated, taking it to a restaurant run by Semyon (Mueller-Stahl). In a vivid Cronenbergian image, Semyon is stirring a vat of borscht in which nameless things float; dismembered body parts, aborted foetuses. The diary details Anna's innocent hope for a new life in London and its subsequent descent into the horror of the sex trade, a vile business in which Semyon and Nikolai are intimately acquainted. The new London is captured in all its opulence and decay. Views over London Bridge capture the renovated waterfront. The Russian ??migr??s are all furs and leather - wealth flaunted without the inhibition of the indigenous bourgeoisie - and there is even a scene set outside a Chelsea game, the football club that became the plaything for oligarchs in exile. Against such ostentation, the girls are imprisoned in suburban houses, the curtains drawn, the windows sealed, a lap dancing pole installed in the front room. When Nikolai and his captain Kiril want to dispose of a body it is down an alleyway that runs into the Thames, the same alleyways down which all the city's horrors have been committed. Far below the new skyscrapers and private equity wealth, this remains a city of dreadful night for the poor and na??ve, a vicious predator of brick and shadow quick to sink its teeth into the latest supply of the weak. Viggo Mortensen played the ambiguous hero of David Cronenberg's previous film, A History Of Violence: Eastern Promises is a more convincing execution of that film's themes and feel. A move away from Cronenberg's canon of fantasy body horror, from Scanners to The Fly, the film's are a double-bill in the director's development. If A History Of Violence slipped its moorings toward the denouement, Eastern Promises unfolds with ruthless guile. Nikolai is an unforgettable cinematic event: his body is a weapon covered in tattoos that tell his prison history. The stand-out scene is a fight to the death in a Finsbury steam bath, with Nikolai naked against two Chechen mobsters wielding curved blades. Like Guy Pearce in Memento, Christian Bale in The Machinist, Brad Pitt in Fight Club or even Jim Caviezel in The Passion Of The Christ, the role of the scarified male torso in contemporary cinema deserves an essay: Mortensen's none-more-naked performance in this scene lashes across the screen, a modern mortification of the flesh, as his surname suggests.

Naomi Watts is missing one or two scenes to prevent her character being entirely overwhelmed by these alluring monsters. At home with mother (Cusack) and Russian uncle, we get hints at a painful backstory, a failed relationship, a lost child. Her baby-hunger provides Eastern Promises with its note of redemption. After all the violence and sexual exploitation, it seems the one thing we can all agree on is that babies should not be harmed. Think of the closing scenes of Kill Bill Vol. 2, Children Of Men, The Way Of The Gun, even Star Wars Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith - in a morally ambivalent universe, it's only when we are teetering on the edge of infanticide that we find out who the real villains are. In an age in which heroes mutilate corpses, it's reassuring to see that the line is drawn somewhere.
Verdict
A violent taut thriller that explores an entirely different moral universe: Hackney.