Eastern Promises [2007]
Director: David Cronenberg
Actor: Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Watts, Vincent Cassel, Armin Mueller-Stahl
I’ve always had a strong interest in the Vory v Zakone, a particularly branch of the Russian organised crime world. The vory have strict rules that they abide by, and they consider prison their home, freedom being a temporary thing. Of course, in reality things don’t really work this way, but the vory did spring forth from prison culture, and their characteristic prison tattoos, while not even half as beautiful as the famous Yakuza tattoos, do tell the tale of your life, and are as important. As a result, when I saw the trailer for this film not so long ago, I knew I wanted to go and see it. Cronenberg, Mortensen and the vory, can’t go wrong, right? :)
The movie is part of a set of movies, starting with A History of Violence, also by Cronenberg, also starring Viggo Mortensen. This film, while different, has a lot of similarities to its predecessor, and should really be seen as two parts of a whole. For instance, where in A History of Violence the seemingly normal, every day man seems to have a touch of violent in him, in Eastern Promises it’s the seemingly violent man that has touches of calm in himself. Anyway…
…Nikolai is a driver for a Russian crime family in London. He is confronted by Anna, a midwife at a hospital who is trying to get in contact with the family of a fourteen year-old girl that died while in labour, in order to bring to them her new-born baby. She has nothing to go on except her diary, which shows that she was a girl smuggled to London under false promises of work, only to be forced into prostitution. The information in the diary is potentially very harmful to the crime family, and the head of the family, Semyon (Mueller-Stahl) asks Nikolai to make sure the information never reaches the police. In the meantime, Nikolai is caught between the degenerating relationship between Semyon and his son Kirill (Cassel).
From all accounts, the main actors in the film, none of who are Russian, manage to speak Russian rather well, and a lot of research was done into the authenticity of the language, customs and mannerisms. Regardless, it’s a great film that I think I might go and see again sometime soon.