EASTERN PROMISES

Blood will out in Eastern Promises, marking its first two scenes – a gangster getting his throat slit; a pregnant girl collapsing with placental eruption – with red sticky pools; also of course metaphorically, since the film is all about family and Family (Russian Mafia in London). I’ve actually watched this twice now, once in Toronto a few months ago, once last week at the Cineplex. Why the second pass? Simply because – much as I enjoyed it – I couldn’t believe how seriously people were taking it.

Here, for instance, is Amy Taubin, a respected American critic, writing in highbrow mag Artforum and naming Eastern Promises her No. 3 film of the year: “Complicated morality, homoeroticized violence, terrifying tribalism, and masterfully theatrical filmmaking. Viggo Mortensen is charismatic, inscrutable and wickedly funny. The Russian bathhouse fight scene is already a classic.” Not bad for a film with cartoonish accents, a Mafia boss sipping borscht and playing the violin, and Mortensen told to find a minion and “breeng heem here, weeth bitch of a wife” among other giggle-inducing moments.

This is a film by David Cronenberg, who’s never been afraid to court ridicule. He’s the man who took a hairy-mutant B-movie about a man who turns into a fly – The Fly (1986) – and played it, superbly, as straight-faced love story. On the surface, Promises recalls the eccentric final third of Cronenberg’s previous film A History of Violence (also with Viggo Mortensen), with gangsters so outlandish they verge on the risible. Armin Mueller-Stahl is Semyon, the criminal patriarch, fulminating against “blacks, whores and queers”; Vincent Cassel is manic as Kirill, his unstable son. Viggo is Nikolai, an up-and-coming sidekick-cum-bodyguard, who’s so tough he stubs out a cigarette on his own tongue (ooh!) and coolly sets to work cutting off a corpse’s fingers and pulling out its teeth. “You might want to leave the room,” he observes. Thanks, I think we will.

The plot begins with blood, i.e. family – a baby girl already orphaned at birth and London midwife Anna (Naomi Watts) trying to trace the mother’s family, her only clue being a diary in Russian. Anna’s own blood runs both English and Russian, though the two don’t always mesh. Her English mum is diffident and civilised, forever trying to steer a middle path and respect all points of view. Her Russian father is dead but his brother, Anna’s uncle, is stubborn and outrageously racist, chiding her for having had a black boyfriend; “it is wrong to mix the races, that’s why your baby died inside of you”. Russia stands for something in this movie, the old atavistic values where blood matters, and who you are matters (“Slaves give birth to slaves”), and the world is a brutal physical place of Us against Them – the opposite of tolerant, multi-cultural Britain.

People are meat for the Mob, things of flesh and blood (blood again). Nikolai slices up a corpse just as he later takes a young prostitute without a second thought – but then he pities her and asks her name, which makes her human (later the cops rescue her because they know her name, having presumably been tipped off by Nikolai). In the world of Vory V Zakone, the Russian Mafia, one’s identity is inextricably bound up with one’s body: gangsters tell their life-story in tattoos inscribed on their flesh, literally illustrating who they are. That’s their identity, which is why Nikolai’s initiation as a “Vor” also involves repudiating his past life, renouncing his mother and father – echoing Anna’s earlier comment that “Birth and death often go together”.

Eastern Promises is bold, intricate filmmaking, perched on the edge between hammy and scary. Bodies are abused in ways that invite nervous laughter, a slit throat sliding open in a huge prosthetic gash, a knife stuck in an eyeball (‘You’ve got something in your eye,’ Nikolai might quip if he were played by Roger Moore). Bodies also have secret lives, notably the homoerotic undertones between Nikolai and obviously-closeted Kirill. At the climax – the fight in the aforementioned bathhouse – naked bodies look horribly vulnerable, spilling blood (blood again) from every orifice.