Looking back on this still-young century makes clear that 2007 was a major time for cinematic happenings — and, on the basis of this retrospective, one we’re not quite through with ten years on. One’s mind might quickly flash to a few big titles that will be represented, but it is the plurality of both festival and theatrical premieres that truly surprises: late works from old masters, debuts from filmmakers who’ve since become some of our most-respected artists, and mid-career turning points that didn’t necessarily announce themselves as such at the time. Join us as an assembled team, many of whom were coming of age that year, takes on their favorites.
In remembering David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, one scene immediately comes to mind: Viggo Mortensen fighting two fully clothed men in a bathhouse while completely nude. Cronenberg, never one to shy away from showing the human body, doesn’t cut when we see Mortensen crawling on the floor, tossed from one side of the room to the other, or fighting one of his would-be assassins one-on-one.
An iconic Cronenberg moment, the bathhouse scene is right up there with the head explosion in Scanners, James Woods inserting his head into a television in Videodrome, and Jeff Goldblum pulling off his fingernails in The Fly. However, now a decade since its release, Eastern Promises often fails to get mentioned when looking at the director’s finest works, so on its 10th anniversary, we’re revisiting this underrated gem. It’s a film where Mortensen gives his best performance, in the second of three collaborations with Cronenberg becoming one of the best actor-director pairings of our generation, and a strong late entry in the career of one of Canada’s most respected auteurs.
Eastern Promises tells two narratives. The first follows Naomi Watt’s Anna Khitrova, a midwife of British and Russian descent living in London with her mother. After retrieving the diary of a pregnant 14-year-old who dies during childbirth, Khitrova asks her uncle if he could translate it, for it is written in Russian. Khitrova seeks information about the young woman’s family through her diary, her ultimate goal to track them down so that they may take in the newborn that Khitrova has named Christine, the name of the child she was supposed to have but ended in miscarriage.
Inside the diary is a card for a Trans-Siberian restaurant run by an older man named Semyon. With baby-blue eyes and a warm smile, he looks like a grandpa who always hands you a dollar so you can buy your favorite candy without your parents knowing. But he’s the head, or vory v zakone (Thief in Law), of the Russian mob’s London branch. When Khitrova mentions Tatiana to Semyon, he lets her know, gently, that he doesn’t know anyone by that name; when she mentions the diary, Semyon’s warm, soft face stiffens, his eyes drop, and then (still trying to retain that grandpa-like vibe) offers to translate the diary for her. What Khitrova doesn’t realize is that she, a so-called “normal” person, is about get involved with a group of people who have no sympathy when it comes to harming men, women, even children. Right before she meets Semyon, Khitrova walks by two men, Semyon’s hotheaded son, Kirill (Vincent Cassell), and Mortensen’s Nikolai Luzhin, who works as Kirill’s chauffeur.
The second narrative is Luzhin’s rise to the top of the vory v zakone. With his dark hair, sunglasses, and clothes, his voice always calm and his face effortlessly stoic, Luzhin resmbles a Russian version of The Matrix‘s Agent Smith. And while he likes to tell Khitrova that he is “just driver,” he’s anything but. In one of the most gruesome moments, Luzhin is brought in to take care of and dispose of a dead body belonging to a man killed in the film’s opening scene. Luzhin clips off his frozen fingers one-by-one, instructing the people in the room before he does so that it’s best if they leave; we go to the next scene, but not before Cronenberg gives us a close up of a finger getting snapped off. (Even in one of his less-gruesome films, he still gives us a moment or two to make us cringe in our chairs.) Besides being “just driver” and a clean-up man, toward the end of the movie, he is revealed to be a member of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB), working with Scotland Yard to infiltrate the vorys from within.
Eastern Promises, based on an original screenplay by Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things, Locke), can be viewed as a companion to Cronenberg’s previous picture, 2005’s A History of Violence (Cronenberg would disagree with that), and a connection can also be made to the film he directed before that, 2002’s Spider. Released in the early-to-mid aughts, all were seen as departures from the body horror and science fiction films that he is well known for — excepting for the two scenes involving throats getting slit, inspired by videos of Muslim extremists beheading prisoners of war. This trio of films, while different in tone, all have one thing in common with their focus on family.
Spider concerns a man (Ralph Fiennes) as he tries to reconstruct the memory involving the murder of his mother; A History of Violence finds another (Mortensen) confronting his past as well as his old family while trying to protect his new one. Family comes up at numerous points in Eastern Promises. The latter takes place during the holidays, a time where families are meant to come together. When Kirill and Luzhin see the now-frozen body of the man who was killed in the beginning of the film, Kirill mentions that he was “like a brother to me.” There is obvious tension between Kirill and his father, stemming from the fact that Kirill is a closeted homosexual, which is frowned upon not only by his father but from the crime family with which they are both involved. Khritova is living with her mother after her husband left her, which may have been due to her losing their child. The bathhouse scene happens because Seymon, trying to save his own son’s life, sets up Luzhin. The two men who believe Luzhin is Kirill are brothers of the man who gets his fingers snapped off and are out for revenge. Most notably, Luzhin, standing across from the heads of the vorys, has his family insulted to his face as part of the initiation; when the initiation is done, he is given star tattoos on his chest and knees, thereby bringing him into the family.
The tattoos are a kind of resume that’s kept on their skin at all times. A detective tells his partner, upon discovering the body of the man Luzhin has taken care of and dumped into the river, that “in Russian prisons, your life story is written on your body.” It was Mortensen who made Cronenberg aware of the tattoo culture surrounding the Russian mob after seeing the documentary The Mark of Cain and reading a number of books on Russian prison culture. “They’d be checking out the tattoos to see if you actually earned what you’re wearing,” Mortensen told the New York Post when discussing the extensive research he did for the role. “If they find out you didn’t, they’ll say, ‘That tattoo on your arm, you didn’t earn that — we’ll give you an hour to get rid of it.’ So you’re either going to have to cut it out or burn it off. And if you don’t, they’ll come back and beat you nearly to death, and then do it for you.”
When Cronenberg told Mortensen about the role over the phone, the actor immediately said yes, and traveled to Russia and met with Russian mobsters both in prison and out. The accent he delivers in Eastern Promises is so convincing you’d think it was his actual voice, never coming off as an impression or, worse, a mockery of the way Russians speak English.
In one interview, Cronenberg compared the relationship between him and Mortensen to “a marriage,” as the two brought out the best out of one another. However, it should be noted that while the new relationship between director and actor helped propel Eastern Promises to be more than just your run-of-the-mill European crime drama, it’s the existing relationships, those shared with cinematographer Peter Suschitzky and editor Ronald Sanders — two men who have worked with Cronenberg since the late 80s — that show the fluidity of their collaboration, creating a film that feels effortlessly slick and cutting in its brutality.
While some may view Eastern Promises as another departure from the genre filmmaking that made Cronenberg such a compelling figure to watch in his first decades as a filmmaker, the director doesn’t stray far from the elements that he’s known for. Luzhin, whether it is part of his act as a mobster or the one part of him he has allowed to be free even in front of the vorys, is a religious man. While he is getting the stars on his chest and knees and, in the final shot, where it’s alluded to that he has taken Seymon’s place, he is holding a wristband and hitting himself with it over and over again, penance for what he has done and what he will continue to do. It doesn’t seem to cause any pain, perhaps a slap on the wrist; however, if he is truly a religious man, one who has committed multiple sins and will have to commit more, in Luzhin’s mind, each slap is equivalent to a harsh one across his back. A head explosion is over in an instant, but knowing you are betraying yourself, your religion, and your God is a feeling that lasts much, much longer — one of the most brutal punishments anybody’s endured in a Cronenberg film.
Earlier this year, reports of a sequel to Eastern Promises, titled Body Cross, made headlines, with production starting in the spring. Mortensen was rumored to return, along with Cassell and Knight. There’s no word on whether Cronenberg would also, but to see him once again bring to life the lush, dark, dangerous, and attractive world of Eastern Promises would be a welcome opportunity.
Follow our complete retrospective on the best films of 2007.