Sin leaves many a mark in Cronenberg’s ‘Eastern Promises’

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Director David Cronenberg’s latest film has arrived late in Taiwanese theaters. Viggo Mortensen was nominated for Best Actor at this year’s Academy Awards for Eastern Promises after his alluring embodiment of a most repellent character won many fans, but he was beaten at the post by Daniel Day-Lewis, whose oil man sociopath in There Will Be Blood was even more repellent.

Late, indeed, but great. With A History of Violence and this film, Cronenberg has shifted a pioneering, intellectual, lifelong concern with the body — its strengths and frailties, its beauty and all its horrid aberrations, almost always intertwined — just a little inward.

In A History of Violence, Mortensen played a model husband in rural America with a past so terrible that he had to transform himself mentally, even physically, to escape. In Eastern Promises, Mortensen is Nikolai, an ambitious Russian mafia kingpin in the making who has to muscle in on his employers’ organization to get where he wants to go. This, too, requires bodily change as part of a step up from his mundane jobs for the mob: ritual tattooing and wounds from would-be assassins are among them. But his critical, inward change is hidden until late in the film.

At first, Nikolai is nowhere to be seen. The story starts with two grisly acts that seem unconnected: the slaughter of a customer at a barber shop and a very young foreign mother dying as she gives birth in a store. Midwife Anna (Naomi Watts) tends to the baby that arrives at the hospital, and locates a diary that leads her to a friendly old Russian restaurant owner, Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), whose interest in the diary and the baby drag Anna into London’s Russian underworld.

Nikolai also takes a keen interest in Anna and the diary, even as he maneuvers to usurp his boss Kirill (Vincent Cassel), Semyon’s son and the organizer of the hit at the barber shop, to claim the head seat at the gangsters’ table. Through all this, the survival of the baby hangs in the balance, because its existence poses a very big threat to very dangerous people.

Eastern Promises is a mainstream film by Cronenberg’s standards, yet it retains the cool, detached eye that has marked his films over the decades. The rich colors and congeniality of Semyon’s home are an illusion, while the sinister intentions of Nikolai are more complex than they seem, yet unknowable to almost everyone.

Cassel is fine as the undisciplined pretender to the throne, as is the rest of the cast, though Watts comes across as a plot catalyst rather than a fully developed character with a credible motivation to flirt with extreme danger. In the end, however, the film prizes Mortensen and his body — gaunt, muscular, naked, sliced up, branded, aroused — and this carries the film to a twist that takes it deep into Cronenbergland.

Cronenberg has brought some of the most gruesome fantasy images imaginable to multiplex and art-house theaters over the years (Samantha Eggar licking her newborn mutation in The Brood, the exploding head in Scanners, body-weapon morphing in Videodrome and the gynecological instruments in Dead Ringers, for example), yet in Eastern Promises even the most bloodcurdling moments of ruffian blade meeting flesh and bone seem discreet and concise. The emphasis here is not on bodily decay or dismemberment but on how the body acts as a canvas for power, both physical and moral.