Eastern Promises

Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises
From Russia with tattoos... Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises.

David Cronenberg has always been known as the laureate of transgression and body-horror. His new picture about Russian gangsters in London should have given him plenty of material. The Vory V Zakone mob have an intense, almost mystical reverence for tattoos: fierce, ugly symbols intended to abash and horrify those outside the brotherhood, and perhaps do exactly the same thing, only more intensely, to those inside.

An intriguing scene in Eastern Promises shows the central tough guy Nikolai, played by Viggo Mortensen, sprawling back and sensually, almost erotically submitting to the tattooist's needle. He is receiving the all-important star-signs that denote his new status as the Russian equivalent of a made guy. There is also a tremendous scene in a steamy bath-house, in which Nikolai, stark naked and weaponless, must fight for his life with two knife-wielding assassins. Cronenberg shows that it is somehow these tattoo-fetishes that are his weapons: tokens of a warrior's indifference to pain.

Unfortunately, the rest of the film does not measure up either to Cronenberg's established reputation as a flesh-fetishist or to the skill he latterly showed, in the excellent A History of Violence, for more conventional dramatic fare. Eastern Promises has a first-rate cast, and the script by the talented British screenwriter Steve Knight - who explored similar ideas about a London migrant underworld in his previous script, Dirty Pretty Things - is hardly without interest. But all too often it is clunky and inauthentic-sounding, both in terms of Russian and London culture. An Australian plays a Brit, and a German, American and Frenchman play Russians - mostly with a byeeeg Ryussian accyent. Worryingly, I sometimes felt I was watching a feature-length episode of The Bill.

Mortensen's enigmatic tough guy works for expatriate patriarch Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl) and his nogoodnik son Kirill (Vincent Cassel). With a grisly mixture of brutality and sentimentality for the old country, they run drugs and other activities and launder the cash-flow through a gloomy establishment called the Trans-Siberian Restaurant. Their world comes under investigation, not from the police, but from a hospital midwife called Anna, played by Naomi Watts. Anna is suffering from depression following a failed relationship and a miscarriage. Her troubled emotional state causes her to conceive an obsession with the orphan baby of a teenage Russian girl who died on her watch; the girl's diary appallingly appears to show that she was trafficked to the UK and then raped by these same mobsters. Bravely, this lone nurse shows up at their creepy restaurant to find out what has been going on, and gets out of her depth. Only enigmatic Nikolai is her friend.

You don't expect bad performances from a cast as top-notch as this, and you don't get them, though Vincent Cassel is very broad as the out-of-control son, always roaring, brawling and swigging booze straight from the bottle. Anna is harassed and subdued in her new post-relationship life, living with her mum (Sinead Cusack). Desperately lonely, Anna is charmed in spite of herself by the playful, twinkly-eyed Semyon - some nice scenes with Mueller-Stahl - who instinctively senses how she longs for a comforting father figure. There are interesting scenes, moments, ideas: but Eastern Promises does not have the sinew and boldness of Cronenberg's best work.