Deborah Ross

Cut-throat world

Cinema: Eastern Promises

This is either a seriously good film with some flaws or a seriously flawed film with some good elements. I am hoping to work out which it is by the finish of this, otherwise I will have denied you a proper ending, and we all know how irritating that is.

Eastern Promises opens with a throat-cutting slaughter in a barber’s shop — and why wouldn’t it? This being a David Cronenberg film — and then almost instantly cuts to the bloodied birth of a baby. Life and death, death and life, and all of it pretty brutal and all that. Nothing new here. Nothing to write home about. But, thankfully, the plot speedily and greedily surges forward.

The baby’s mother — a 14-year-old Russian, Tatiana — dies giving birth but at least has the good sense to do so on the watch of Anna (Naomi Watts), one of the hospital’s midwives. Anna is determined to do right by the child, and using the dead girl’s diary (written in Russian) attempts to find whatever family Tatiana might have had. In so doing, she quickly gets caught up in the Vory V. Zakone, an implacable brotherhood within the Russian mafia. Operating in London, this particular branch specialises in smuggled drugs and sex slavery, and soon Anna is dealing with the mob boss, Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), his son Kirill (Vincent Cassel), a mewling mess of a boy, and their driver and chief dumper of dead bodies, Nikolai, played by Viggo Mortensen who, in the cheekbone department, is all bone and no cheek and could scare you witless just passing the salt. That said, though, such are the actual subtleties of Mortensen’s performance — the odd sardonic smile; the slight tightening of a look — you’re aware, from the off, that what he is on the outside might not have anything to do with what he is on the inside.

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