Eastern Promises (2007)

Another movie I watched on this last week off working suffering with a hell of a head cold was David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises. It's the second film he's made with Viggo Mortenson, after A History of Violence, and it's similar in that it eschews science-fiction/horror elements in place of a real-world drama, albeit with trademark Cronenberg blood and gore. 

Set in London, Naomi Watts plays a British midwife who is present when a 14-year old Russian girl is brought in and gives birth, before the mother dies. Watts attempts to find out who the girl is and thus who to send the baby to, and in doing so she crosses paths with Mortenson's Russian crime syndicate driver, who is not what he appears to be... Set in the murky world of Russian organised crime, Cronenberg presents a part of London I didn't know existed. 

Eastern Promises is a strange film, and not an easy one to like. It's not as weird as Spider or eXistenZ, and is somehow free of much incident. There is a twist towards the end that I didn't see coming, but it's nothing too difficult to grasp. Watts and Mortenson spend little time together in the movie, and their plots only cross intermittently. A fine cast that includes Vincent Cassel and Armin Mueller-Stahl makes an interesting alternative to tales of the Italian (American) mafia, but I never really cared enough about what was going on.

The infamous scene in which Mortenson fights off two attackers in a sauna, where he's naked throughout, is brave and utterly unerotic, especially at the end when Mortenson stabs one of the attackers in the eye. Horrible. I don't really like gore, but I like Cronenberg, particularly his The Fly remake, so occasionally I had to cover my eyes - in the first 5 minutes a young assassin slices open a victim's jugular... I say 'slices' but 'saws' is more accurate, in a scene of spurting crimson blood... It's a bit much. Eastern Promises has its intrigues then, but perhaps not as much promise as it might have had.