Eastern Promises

Eastern Promises
File:Eastern promises.jpg
Directed by	David Cronenberg
Written by	Steve Knight
Produced by	Paul Webster Robert Lantos
Starring	Viggo Mortensen Naomi Watts Vincent Cassel Armin Mueller-Stahl Brice Stratford
Cinematography	Peter Suschitzky
Music by	Howard Shore
Distributed by	Focus Features
Release dates	September 8, 2007

Eastern Promises is a 2007 drama and thriller feature film directed by David Cronenberg. The screenplay was written by Steve Knight, whose previous credits include Stephen Frears' Dirty Pretty Things. The film premiered September 8, 2007 at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Cast

• Viggo Mortensen as Nikolai Luzhin
• Naomi Watts as Anna Khitrova, Semyon calls her "Anna Ivanovna" (using the patronymic)
• Vincent Cassel as Kirill
• Armin Mueller-Stahl as Semyon
• Sinéad Cusack as Helen
• Donald Sumpter as Yuri
• Jerzy Skolimowski as Stepan

Director's comments concerning the plot

Adam Nayman of Eye Weekly reported that director David Cronenberg said "Just don't give the plot away" and Nayman wrote "His request is understandable." Nayman said, "There is one scene – the in-depth discussion of which prompted the director's anti-spoiler request referenced at the top of this story – that should rank not only in his personal pantheon of spectacularly deployed gore but among the most exhilaratingly visceral patches of cinema, period, full stop." Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert noted Cronenberg's quote and agreed, saying "He is correct that it would be fatal, because this is not a movie of what or how, but of why. And for a long time you don't see the why coming."

Plot synopsis

Todd McCarthy of Variety wrote that the film has "some great twists." David Elliott of The San Diego Union-Tribune and film critic Tony Medley also noted the twists in the film.

Anna Khitrova (Naomi Watts), a midwife at a London hospital delivers a baby girl from an unconscious and hemorrhaging fourteen-year-old prostitute. The prostitute dies during childbirth and has no identification other than a diary, written in Russian and a business card for a restaurant called Trans-Siberian. Wanting to find relatives for the new-born girl, Anna sets out to uncover the mother's identity. Anna visits the restaurant, owned by charismatic Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), a boss in the Russian Mafia or vory v zakone ("thieves in law"), who offers to help by translating the diary.

Anna and her mother Helen (Sinéad Cusack) are visited by her Russian-born uncle Stepan (Jerzy Skolimowski), who urges her to destroy the diary and leave things as they are. Anna continues to search for the truth as Semyon becomes more interested in her and the diary. With Stepan's grudging help she learns that Semyon had raped the prostitute who died in childbirth and realises that Semyon is the father of the baby girl.

Outside Trans-Siberian she meets Nikolai Luzhin (Viggo Mortensen), a chauffeur and enforcer in Semyon's criminal enterprises. Nikolai spends most of his time with Semyon's unstable son, Kirill (Vincent Cassel), a violent and abusive drunk. Nikolai is forced to use his tact and diplomacy to keep Kirill out of trouble and to limit the problems Kirill causes through his stupidity and excesses.

Of Kirill's excesses, the latest is an ill-advised murder on a rival Chechen vory leader. Semyon knows that the Chechens will seek revenge and hatches a plan to save Kirill. He will let the Chechens kill Nikolai, but make them think they have killed Kirill. First Semyon has Nikolai promoted to Kirill's rank: Kaptain (and has him accordingly tattooed.) Then, with the Chechens searching London, he sends Nikolai to a bath-house. Nikolai thinks he is meeting with another gangster, but Semyon has an intermediary alert the Chechens, who arrive, ready to kill Kirill. In a desperate battle of survival, a naked Nikolai fights for his life, killing his attackers but enduring severe knife wounds.

Hospitalised after the fight, Nikolai is visited by a Scotland Yard detective specialising in the Russian Mafia; it is revealed that Nikolai is an undercover officer of the Russian Security Services (FSB) working with the British police. Nikolai explains that he knows the baby from the teenage prostitute is Semyon's child. He reasons that a simple paternity test will prove Semyon has had unlawful sex with a minor and give grounds for arrest and conviction.

After being arrested and forced to give blood, Semyon realises what is happening and assigns Kirill to kidnap and dispose of the baby girl. Kirill succeeds in the kidnapping but when Anna discovers the baby missing she recruits Nikolai's help to find her.

Nikolai knows where Kirill is most likely to dispose of a body and together with Anna, races to the slipway on the River Thames. They find Kirill, holding the baby by the water, but suffering a crisis of conscience. They convince Kirill not to throw the baby into the river, but to hand the child to Anna. Nikolai hugs Kirill telling him that his father, Semyon, will be going away and they will be in control themselves with nothing to fear.

The story closes with Anna raising the child (now several years older) at her home, and Nikolai sitting alone at the restaurant with the status of being the crime lord but deep in contemplation.

Production

Shooting began in November 2006, and various scenes were filmed in St John's Street, Farringdon, London. Filming also took place in Broadway Market, Hackney. The "Trans-Siberian Restaurant" is located in a building on the Southern end of St John's Street, next to Smithfield Market. The entrance to the "Ankara Social Club" of the film is actually the front door of a residential flat. The Broadway Market hair dresser known as "Broadway Gents Hairstylist" was changed to "Azims Hair Salon", where in the film one of the Russians is murdered. The owner Mr Ismail Yesiloglu decided to keep the majority of the shopfront after filming. In the original script, the name was "Ozims Hair Salon", but it was later changed to "Azims" as there is no such name as Ozim in Turkish.

According to the New York Daily News Viggo Mortensen studied Russian gangsters and the tattoos they wear, and also consulted a documentary on the subject called The Mark of Cain. The tattoos that he wore were, according to the New York Daily News, so real that when he went into a Russian restaurant in London, a Russian couple sitting next to him became very quiet when they saw the tattoos on his hands, but since Mortensen could not speak ten words of Russian the mood of the restaurant changed back to normal. From that day on he washed his tattoos away when he went off the set.

The script made a point of excluding guns, and Cronenberg deliberately left any sight of them out of the movie. In an interview, Cronenberg explained, that the knives used in the film's pivotal fight scene weren't "some kind of exotic Turkish knives, they’re linoleum knives. [He] felt that these guys could walk around in the streets with these knives, and if they were ever caught, they could say 'we’re linoleum cutters.'"

Release

The film premiered September 8, 2007 at the Toronto International Film Festival where it won the Audience Prize for best film on September 15, 2007. Eastern Promises opened in limited release in Russia on September 13, 2007.

In the United States and Canada, the film opened in limited release in 15 theaters on September 14, 2007 and grossed $547,092 — averaging $36,472 per theater. The film opened in wide release in the United States and Canada on September 21, 2007 (expanding to 1,404 theaters) and ranked #5 at the box office, grossing $5,659,133 — an average of $4,030 per theater. The film has grossed $31,925,064 worldwide as of November 4, 2007 — $17,266,000 in the United States and Canada and $14,659,064 in other territories.

The film took part in competition at the San Sebastian Film Festival September 20 2007.

The film was shown at the London Film Festival on October 17, 2007 and was released in the United Kingdom on October 26, 2007.

Critical reception

As of September 25, 2007 on Rotten Tomatoes, 89% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 123 reviews. On Metacritic, the film had an average score of 82 out of 100, based on 35 reviews.

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four stars and wrote "Eastern Promises is no ordinary crime thriller, just as Cronenberg is no ordinary director", and said "Cronenberg has moved film by film into the top rank of directors, and here he wisely reunites with Mortensen" who "digs so deeply into the role you may not recognize him at first." Ebert said the film has a fight scene that "sets the same kind of standard that The French Connection set for chases. Years from now, it will be referred to as a benchmark." Ebert praised the casting directors, saying the choice of Mortensen was "pitch-perfect." Ebert also said "What the director and writer do here is not unfold a plot, but flay the skin from a hidden world." J. Hoberman of the Village Voice said "I've said it before and hope to again: David Cronenberg is the most provocative, original, and consistently excellent North American director of his generation", saying "neither Scorsese nor Spielberg, and not even David Lynch, has enjoyed a comparable run." Hoberman said the film is "directed with considerable formal intelligence and brooding power" and continues the trend of "murderous family dramas" seen in Spider and A History of Violence. Hoberman called the film "graphic but never gratuitious in its violence", "garish yet restrained", "a masterful mood piece", "deceptively generic" and said the film "suggests a naturalized version of the recent Russian horror flick Night Watch." When describing the cast, Hoberman said "Mueller-Stahl may be perfunctory...but Vincent Cassel literally flings himself into [his role]" and "Mortensen is even more electrifying as Nikolai than in A History of Violence" Los Angeles Times critic Carina Chocano said "Expertly realized and gunmetal slick, Eastern Promises whirs along with perfect efficiency, but doesn't stir much in the way of visceral horror despite its penchant for treating the human body like a chicken carcass on a block." Chocano wrote "the movie is in many ways a B-movie companion piece to A History of Violence", and noted similarities to The Godfather. Chocano said "the movie is much less corporeal" than Cronenberg's previous films and wrote that Cronenberg's career "has in some ways been a reprise of the greatest fears of the 1950s, so it makes sense that technophobia and fear of the unrecognizable self have given way to xenophobia and fear of the unrecognizable society."

Chris Vognar of The Dallas Morning News gave the film a "B+" and said "The film's genius performance belongs to the venerable Armin Mueller-Stahl, who plays the family head with a twinkling eye and an air of avuncular, Old World charm." Vognar wrote "Where some may see melodrama, Mr. Cronenberg locates timeless, elemental struggles between good and evil, right and wrong. But he makes sure to place a mysterious gray area front and center, personified here by Mr. Mortensen's Nikolai", writing "Nikolai Luzhin is...like Ray Bradbury's Illustrated Man...only more dangerous" and "scarily enigmatic." Vognar wrote that Eastern Promises shares themes of "ambiguous identity and rage-soaked duality" with A History of Violence and said both films "have a lock-step precision and both take a sly kind of joy in subverting genre expectations." Vognar said Eastern Promises "is a little too mechanical for its own good...but the mechanics also produce an admirable crispness and sense of purpose, a sense that the man behind the camera knows exactly what he's doing at all times." Film Journal International critic Doris Toumarkine said the film is a "highly entertaining but sometimes revolting look at a particularly venal branch of the Russian mob." Toumarkine wrote that Mortensen and Watts "are intriguing moral counterpoints. They are also the key ingredients that make Eastern Promises a highly delectable and cinematically rich borsht that upscale film fans will devour." She described Mortensen's performance as "startling," called Watts "touching," Cassel "particularly delicious," but said "Mueller-Stahl, Cusack, and Skolimowski don’t have as much to chew on." She said the film "is also blessed by Howard Shore's restrained score, which lets the film’s other estimable elements breathe through." Toumarkine also said the film is "essentially a character-driven crime thriller but is also a bloody tour de force laced with considerable nudity and sexually bold content that will rattle the squeamish." Todd McCarthy of Variety said the film is "a superbly wrought yarn" and "instantly takes its place among David Cronenberg's very best films", and said "it's possible that Cronenberg has never made a film of such consistent tone and control." McCarthy wrote "it's Mortensen's picture" and that his performance "recalls the magnetic work of Hollywood's greats of yore", "Cassel is at the top of his game", Mueller-Stahl is "mesmerizing", and Skolimowski was an inspired choice." McCarthy said that fans of Cronenberg will surely appreciate the film and said "the way [Steve Knight] spirals and layers his story out from [a] simple beginning is thrilling to behold." Todd McCarthy wrote there are "some great twists and turns-of-events, all the better for their subtlety" and that the ending is "eminently satisfying."

Bruce Westbrook of the Houston Chronicle gave the film one star out of four and said it had a "contrived plot" and wrote "what it's really about, more than sensitivity for displaced people or social analyses, is violence — hideous, gruesome, over-the-top violence." Westbrook said "For Cronenberg, such cheap sensationalism is business as usual, and this far into his career, that business has slipped into artistic bankruptcy", saying that the "history of violence...better served his early phase as a director of hard-hitting horror." He said "in some ways David Cronenberg seems more surgeon than film director. Executing scenes with surgical precision, he doesn't flinch at the sight of blood or the cuts that cause it." Westbrook wrote the film "isn't about Russian gangs so much as Cronenberg's own dark passions not just for violence but excruciating carnage, which he brandishes mercilessly" and that the film was "a stifling descent into grim shock and disturbing awe."

External links

• Official site
• Eastern Promises at IMDb
• Eastern Promises at Rotten Tomatoes
• Eastern Promises at Metacritic
• Eastern Promises at Box Office Mojo
• Eastern Promises at AllMovie
• Eastern Promises movie trailer at Times Online
• David Cronenberg's Preparation for Directing Eastern Promises, an Amazon reference list

Interviews

• Film Comment interview with David Cronenberg
• Village Voice interview with Cronenberg
• GreenCine Daily interviews Cronenberg & Viggo Mortensen
• Viggo Mortensen interview
• Rotten Tomatoes Interview with Cronenberg and Mortensen 2007