Eastern Promises

It might seem strange that a film so brimming over with realism and weighty moral issues should leave me puzzling over the title. I suspect that the good director might even have missed the point...

But maybe many say that about Cronenberg. Videodrome, Crash, eXistenZ. Easier to appreciate in retrospect. Then he shoots accessible stuff – A History Of Violence was almost mainstream and combined critical success with good audience figures. Eastern Promises is a straightforward, well-made mobster movie. But I was left feeling it both exceeded and failed to reach expectations.

The film begins with a rapid shapeshifting and manipulation of audience emotion worthy of Almodovar. We are shocked at the violence, thrown into grief by the terrible story of a young mother who dies on the operating table, and catapulted into warm fuzzies over the silver-lining birth of her child. Cronenberg has learnt that crafting such a heady opening cocktail of feelings leaves us like soft putty in his hands. And fortunately the story never flags from there on. Naomi Watts plays a lovely young nurse. She helps with the birth of the child, sees the death of the mother, and promptly steals her diary. Viggo Mortensen is a menacing-looking gofer for the Russian mob. They want the diary contents to remain secret. Naomi’s uncle, like the dead mother, is Russian. Which provides a foreboding of nasty goings-on, all executed with exceeding flair.

Here’s another good things about it: The Godfather spawned many inferior Italian-mafia copies, but where is the definitive Russian mafia movie? Mostly they boast cardboard stooges for Western film-stars to trounce (eg Snatch). The research done by Mortensen and Cronenberg pays off handsomely: these are the most convincing mobsters I hope you never meet. A fight scene (featuring Mortensen naked in a men’s bathhouse) is one of the best fight scenes ever made. The background on the workings of the mob, especially a code of tattoos and a system of qualifications, is unsettlingly authentic. Many of the actors are Eastern European, and even Mortensen acts very convincingly in Russian.

The moral dilemmas are supposed to be about honour between thieves. Naomi Watts is torn by her hatred of a man in whom she suspects a level of decency and whom she finds attractive. Although she performs it well, her portrayal of a similar predicament is stronger in her ‘acting audition’ scene in Mulholland Drive. But what a consummate actress! Did Cronenberg simply not stretch her enough? Or did he want to keep Eastern Promises as a plot-driven movie? A touch more melodrama could have given it a broader audience and also room to explore more heart-rending themes than cheating the boss. For we are told early on that the dead mother, in her posthumous, ‘diary’ voiceover, was sold as a sex-slave from Eastern Europe.

The pitfall that most filmmakers fall prey to in that debate is getting caught up in the heated ‘ban-prostitution vs legislate-and-regulate’ argument. The uncontroversial work is preventing sex-slavery at source, where girls are sold by friends and boyfriends under the pretense of a fine job waiting in the West. Even UN Goodwill Ambassador Angelina Jolie makes the mistake of demonising men’s desire in her film Inhuman Traffic (which can be seen at mtvexit.org). The strength of Eastern Promises is that it portrays the horror of the woman forced into prostitution but leaves the moral questions to the audience. I hope very much it will be seen by many in Eastern Europe. Thrillers can sometimes reach the masses better than a goodwill film (the Inhuman Traffic website has an array of languages, but even its ‘Russian’ download fails to subtitle the English dialogue.)

Ideological conflict over prostitution and trafficking is so contentious that networking and coalition among anti-trafficking initiatives is often hampered. A small film like this could promise more than entertainment in countries at risk. It could warn people of empty promises that could ruin their lives.