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Eastern Promises is a Canadian 2007 drama and thriller feature film directed by David Cronenberg. The screenplay was written by Steve Knight, whose previous credits include Stephen Frears' Dirty Pretty Things. The film premiered September 8, 2007 at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Cast

• Viggo Mortensen as Nikolai Luzhin
• Naomi Watts as Anna Khitrova, Semyon calls her "Anna Ivanovna" (using the patronymic)
• Vincent Cassel as Kirill
• Armin Mueller-Stahl as Semyon
• Sinéad Cusack as Helen
• Donald Sumpter as Yuri
• Jerzy Skolimowski as Stepan
• Igor Outkine, accordionist and singer in the birthday party scene

Production

Shooting began in November 2006, and various scenes were filmed in St John's Street, Farringdon, London. Filming also took place in Broadway Market, Hackney. The "Trans-Siberian Restaurant" is located in a building on the Southern end of St John's Street, next to Smithfield Market. The entrance to the "Ankara Social Club" of the film is actually the front door of a residential flat. The Broadway Market hair dresser known as "Broadway Gents Hairstylist" was changed to "Azims Hair Salon", where in the film one of the Russians is murdered. The owner Mr Ismail Yesiloglu decided to keep the majority of the shopfront after filming. In the original script, the name was "Ozims Hair Salon", but it was later changed to "Azims" as there is no such name as Ozim in Turkish.

According to the New York Daily News Viggo Mortensen studied Russian gangsters and the tattoos they wear, and also consulted a documentary on the subject called The Mark of Cain. The tattoos that he wore were, according to the New York Daily News, so real that when he went into a Russian restaurant in London, a Russian couple sitting next to him became very quiet when they saw the tattoos on his hands, but since Mortensen could not speak ten words of Russian the mood of the restaurant changed back to normal. From that day on he washed his tattoos away when he went off the set.

The script made a point of excluding guns, and Cronenberg deliberately left any sight of them out of the movie. In an interview, Cronenberg explained, that the knives used in the film's pivotal fight scene weren't "some kind of exotic Turkish knives, they’re linoleum knives. felt that these guys could walk around in the streets with these knives, and if they were ever caught, they could say 'we’re linoleum cutters.'"

Plot

Anna Khitrova (Naomi Watts), a midwife at a London hospital, delivers a baby girl from an unconscious and hemorrhaging fourteen-year-old. The teenager dies during childbirth and has no identification other than a diary, written in Russian and a business card for a restaurant called Trans-Siberian. Wanting to find relatives for the new-born girl, Anna sets out to uncover the mother's identity. Anna visits the restaurant, owned by charismatic Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), a boss in the Russian Mafia or vor v zakone ("thief in law"), who offers to help by translating the diary. For this purpose Anna brings him a copy, but he insists on getting the original too, subtly threatening to harm the baby.

Anna and her mother Helen (Sinéad Cusack) are visited by her Russian-born uncle Stepan (Jerzy Skolimowski), who urges her to destroy the diary and leave things as they are. Anna continues to search for the truth as Semyon becomes more interested in her and the diary. With Stepan's grudging help she learns that Semyon had raped the girl, who was a prostitute in a "club" owned by him, and she realizes that Semyon is the father of the baby girl.

Outside Trans-Siberian she meets Nikolai Luzhin (Viggo Mortensen), a chauffeur and enforcer in Semyon's criminal enterprises. Nikolai spends most of his time with Semyon's unstable son, Kirill (Vincent Cassel), a violent and abusive drunk. Nikolai is forced to use his tact and diplomacy to keep Kirill out of trouble and to limit the problems Kirill causes through his stupidity and excesses.

Anna gives Nikolai the original diary, hoping to get an address of the baby's relatives in return. However, Nikolai says he knows nothing about that. Semyon burns the diary.

Stepan has helped to translate the diary. Semyon learns of this and decides he knows too much, so he orders Nikolai to kill him. Instead, Nikolai sends him to a hotel in Scotland and lies to Semyon, telling him that he has killed Stepan.

Of Kirill's excesses, the latest is an ill-advised murder, together with barber Azim, in his shop, of a rival Chechen criminal leader. The Chechens seek revenge and threaten to kill Azim if he does not help them killing Kirill. Semyon hatches a plan to save Kirill and Azim. Azim will take Nikolai to a bathhouse (a convenient meeting place for mafia members, because the tattoos are exposed) and pretends to the Chechens that Nikolai is Kirill, and let them kill him. First Semyon has Nikolai promoted to Kirill's rank of Captain, and has him tattooed accordingly. In the bathhouse two dressed Chechens attack a naked Nikolai with knives. He manages to kill them but gets severely wounded by the knives himself.

Hospitalized after the fight, Nikolai is visited by a Scotland Yard detective specialising in the Russian Mafia; it is revealed that Nikolai is an undercover officer of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB - a successor to the infamous KGB) working with the British police. The Russians and Scotland Yard want to pull Nikolai out of the operation. He tells the Brit detective to tell his superiors that now that he has been promoted in the mafia organisation it would be a waste to stop now. Also, he recommends taking a blood sample from Semyon and the baby, to confirm that it is his. Since the mother was underage this would be sufficient for proving statutory rape and having him go to prison.

After being forced to submit to a blood test, Semyon realizes what is happening and assigns Kirill to kidnap and dispose of the baby girl. Kirill succeeds in the kidnapping, but when Anna discovers the baby missing she recruits Nikolai's help to find her.

Nikolai knows where Kirill is most likely to dispose of a body and together with Anna, races to the slipway on the River Thames. They find Kirill, holding the baby by the water, but suffering a crisis of conscience. They convince Kirill not to throw the baby into the river, but to hand the child to Anna. Nikolai hugs Kirill telling him that his father, Semyon, will be going away and they will be in control themselves with nothing to fear.

The story closes with Anna raising the child (now several months older) at her home, and Nikolai sitting alone at the restaurant with the status of being the crime lord but deep in contemplation, leaving the viewer to think who Nikolai really is and why he did what he did.

Release

The film premiered September 8, 2007 at the Toronto International Film Festival where it won the Audience Prize for best film on September 15, 2007. Eastern Promises opened in limited release in Russia on September 13, 2007.

In the United States and Canada, the film opened in limited release in 15 theaters on September 14, 2007 and grossed $547,092 — averaging $36,472 per theater. The film opened in wide release in the United States and Canada on September 21, 2007 (expanding to 1,404 theaters) and ranked #5 at the box office, grossing $5,659,133 — an average of $4,030 per theater. The film has grossed $38,350,371 worldwide as of December 9, 2007 — $17,266,000 in the United States and Canada and $21,084,371 in other territories.

The film took part in competition at the San Sebastian Film Festival September 20 2007.

The film was shown at the London Film Festival on October 17, 2007 and was released in the United Kingdom on October 26, 2007.

Critical reception

The film received very positive reviews from critics. As of December 13, 2007, the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported that 88% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 170 reviews. On Metacritic, the film had an average score of 82 out of 100, based on 35 reviews. Todd McCarthy of Variety, David Elliott of The San Diego Union-Tribune, and film critic Tony Medley noted the twists in the film. The film was #4 on Peter Traver's (of Rolling Stone) list of the Best Movies of 2007.

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four stars and wrote "Eastern Promises is no ordinary crime thriller, just as Cronenberg is no ordinary director", and said "Cronenberg has moved film by film into the top rank of directors, and here he wisely reunites with Mortensen" who "digs so deeply into the role you may not recognize him at first." Ebert said the film has a fight scene that "sets the same kind of standard that The French Connection set for chases. Years from now, it will be referred to as a benchmark." Ebert praised the casting directors, saying the choice of Mortensen was "pitch-perfect." Ebert also said "What the director and writer do here is not unfold a plot, but flay the skin from a hidden world." J. Hoberman of the Village Voice said "I've said it before and hope to again: David Cronenberg is the most provocative, original, and consistently excellent North American director of his generation", saying "neither Scorsese nor Spielberg, and not even David Lynch, has enjoyed a comparable run." Hoberman said the film is "directed with considerable formal intelligence and brooding power" and continues the trend of "murderous family dramas" seen in Spider and A History of Violence. Hoberman called the film "graphic but never gratuitous in its violence", "garish yet restrained", "a masterful mood piece", "deceptively generic" and said the film "suggests a naturalized version of the recent Russian horror flick Night Watch." When describing the cast, Hoberman said "Mueller-Stahl may be perfunctory...but Vincent Cassel literally flings himself into " and "Mortensen is even more electrifying as Nikolai than in A History of Violence" Los Angeles Times critic Carina Chocano described the film as "Expertly realized and gunmetal slick, Eastern Promises whirs along with perfect efficiency, but doesn't stir much in the way of visceral horror despite its penchant for treating the human body like a chicken carcass on a block." Chocano wrote "the movie is in many ways a B-movie companion piece to A History of Violence", and noted similarities to The Godfather. Chocano said that "the movie is much less corporeal" than Cronenberg's previous films and wrote that Cronenberg's career "has in some ways been a reprise of the greatest fears of the 1950s, so it makes sense that technophobia and fear of the unrecognizable self have given way to xenophobia and fear of the unrecognizable society."

Chris Vognar of The Dallas Morning News gave the film a "B+" and said "The film's genius performance belongs to the venerable Armin Mueller-Stahl, who plays the family head with a twinkling eye and an air of avuncular, Old World charm." Vognar wrote "Where some may see melodrama, Mr. Cronenberg locates timeless, elemental struggles between good and evil, right and wrong. But he makes sure to place a mysterious gray area front and center, personified here by Mr. Mortensen's Nikolai", writing "Nikolai Luzhin is...like Ray Bradbury's Illustrated Man...only more dangerous" and "scarily enigmatic." Vognar wrote that Eastern Promises shares themes of "ambiguous identity and rage-soaked duality" with A History of Violence and said both films "have a lock-step precision and both take a sly kind of joy in subverting genre expectations." Vognar said Eastern Promises "is a little too mechanical for its own good...but the mechanics also produce an admirable crispness and sense of purpose, a sense that the man behind the camera knows exactly what he's doing at all times." Film Journal International critic Doris Toumarkine said the film is a "highly entertaining but sometimes revolting look at a particularly venal branch of the Russian mob." Toumarkine wrote that Mortensen and Watts "are intriguing moral counterpoints. They are also the key ingredients that make Eastern Promises a highly delectable and cinematically rich borsht that upscale film fans will devour." She described Mortensen's performance as "startling," called Watts "touching," Cassel "particularly delicious," but said "Mueller-Stahl, Cusack, and Skolimowski don’t have as much to chew on." She said the film "is also blessed by Howard Shore's restrained score, which lets the film’s other estimable elements breathe through." Toumarkine also said the film is "essentially a character-driven crime thriller but is also a bloody tour de force laced with considerable nudity and sexually bold content that will rattle the squeamish." Todd McCarthy of Variety said the film is "a superbly wrought yarn" and "instantly takes its place among David Cronenberg's very best films", and said "it's possible that Cronenberg has never made a film of such consistent tone and control." McCarthy wrote "it's Mortensen's picture" and that his performance "recalls the magnetic work of Hollywood's greats of yore", "Cassel is at the top of his game", Mueller-Stahl is "mesmerizing", and Skolimowski was an inspired choice." McCarthy said that fans of Cronenberg will surely appreciate the film and said "the way spirals and layers his story out from simple beginning is thrilling to behold." Todd McCarthy wrote there are "some great twists and turns-of-events, all the better for their subtlety" and that the ending is "eminently satisfying."

Bruce Westbrook of the Houston Chronicle gave the film one star out of four and said it had a "contrived plot" and wrote "what it's really about, more than sensitivity for displaced people or social analyses, is violence — hideous, gruesome, over-the-top violence." Westbrook said "For Cronenberg, such cheap sensationalism is business as usual, and this far into his career, that business has slipped into artistic bankruptcy", saying that the "history of violence...better served his early phase as a director of hard-hitting horror." He said "in some ways David Cronenberg seems more surgeon than film director. Executing scenes with surgical precision, he doesn't flinch at the sight of blood or the cuts that cause it." Westbrook wrote the film "isn't about Russian gangs so much as Cronenberg's own dark passions not just for violence but excruciating carnage, which he brandishes mercilessly" and that the film was "a stifling descent into grim shock and disturbing awe."

Awards and nominations

Eastern Promises won the Audience Prize for best film on September 15, 2007 at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The film received 3 Golden Globe nominations when the nominees for the 65th Golden Globe Awards were announced by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Eastern Promises was nominated for Best Motion Picture - Drama. Viggo Mortensen was nominated for Best Performance By An Actor In A Motion Picture - Drama. And Howard Shore was nominated for Best Original Score for a Motion Picture.

Russian criminal tattoos in the film

Tattoos have huge significance in the Russian criminal underworld.. They are an individual's business card, the story of his life, his deeds, time spent in prison etc. The tattoos used in the movie are fairly authentic, with the "interview" scene, conducted by senior Mob members (actual "vory v zakone", as opposed to Nikolai's character in the beginning of the movie) being surprising in its authenticity and resemblance to what a real life scene might look like.

The tattoos seen in the film, can be found in "The Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia" by D.S. Baldaev, who spent most of his life creating this comprehensive catalog of tattoos (which was also used by the KGB to quickly and easily get information about inmates ).

John Clark of The New York Daily News said:

To burrow into the part, Mortensen, 48, spent several weeks in Russia walking around and taking public transportation. He learned a bit of Russian and had all of his dialogue translated into the language, some of which eventually made its way into the shooting script.

During the shoot itself, he had a Russian cable station on in his room while he was washing his clothes and making dinner. He says he styled Nikolai's enigmatic, withholding nature after Russian President Vladimir Putin.

To acquaint himself with the gangsters in this world, Mortensen learned all he could about the tattoos they sport. He consulted a documentary on the subject, titled "The Mark of Cain," and talked to guys who had them.

"I talked to them about what they meant and where they were on the body, what that said about where they'd been, what their specialties were, what their ethnic and geographical affiliations were," Mortensen says. "Basically their history, their calling card, is their body."

References

1. ^ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0765443/releaseinfo Retrieved 2007-09-15
2. John Clark (2007-09-09). "Viggo Mortensen digs into naked emotional turf". New York Daily News. Retrieved 2007-26-09. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help)
3. Nanna Louise Teckemeier (2007-01-18). %5b%5b:Template:Da icon%5d%5d "Viggo is frightning (Original Danish title: Viggo er skræmmende)". Ekstra Bladet. Retrieved 2007-26-09. {{cite web}}: Check |url= value (help); Check date values in: |accessdate= (help)
4. FOREIGN AFFAIRS: David Cronenberg talks about his strangely intimate new Russian mafia movie Eastern Promises and snuff films on the Internet
5. ^ Tamsen Tillson (2007-09-16). "'Promises' wins best film in Toronto". Variety. Retrieved 2007-09-17. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
6. ^ "Eastern Promises (2007) - Weekend Box Office". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved 2007-09-26.
7. "Eastern Promises (2007)". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved 2007-12-13.
8. "Eastern Promises - Rotten Tomatoes". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved 2007-12-13.
9. "Eastern Promises (2007): Reviews". Metacritic. Retrieved 2007-12-13.
10. Todd McCarthy (2007-09-08). "Eastern Promises". Variety. Retrieved 2007-09-14.
11. David Elliott (2007-09-13). "A history of violence". The San Diego Union-Tribune. Retrieved 2007-11-15. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= and |date= (help)
12. Tony Medley. "Eastern Promises". tonymedley.com. Retrieved 2007-11-15. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help)
13. Travers, Peter, (December 19, 2007) "Peter Travers' Best and Worst Movies of 2007" Rolling Stone. Retrieved 2007-12-20
14. Roger Ebert (2007-09-14). ":: rogerebert.com :: Reviews :: Eastern Promises". Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved 2007-09-14.
15. J. Hoberman (2007-09-11). "Still Cronenberg". Village Voice. Retrieved 2007-09-14.
16. Carina Chocano (2007-09-14). "'Eastern Promises'". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 2007-09-14.
17. Chris Vognar (2007-09-14). "Eastern Promises". The Dallas Morning News. Retrieved 2007-09-14.
18. Doris Toumarkine. "EASTERN PROMISES". Film Journal International. Retrieved 2007-09-14.
19. Todd McCarthy (2007-09-08). "Eastern Promises". Variety. Retrieved 2007-09-14.
20. Bruce Westbrook (2007-09-14). "Hideous, gruesome, over-the-top violence". Houston Chronicle. Retrieved 2007-09-14.
21. "HOLLYWOOD FOREIGN PRESS ASSOCIATION 2008 GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS FOR THE YEAR ENDED DECEMBER 31, 2007". goldenglobes.org. 2007-12-13. Retrieved 2007-12-13. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
22. Baldaev, Danzig Sergeevich (2001). Inmate tattoos (Татуировки Заключенных). Moscow: Limbus Press, ISBN 5-8370-0128-X.
23. Lambert, Alex. Russian Prison Tattoos: Codes of Authority, Domination and Struggle. Russia: ISBN 0-7643-1764-4.
24. Gurov, A. I. (1990). Professional Crime Past and Present. Moscow: Iuridicheskaia Literatura.
25. Baldaev, Danzig Sergeevich. Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia. Russia: ISBN 3-88243-920-3.
26. Baldaev, Danzig Sergeevich. Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia v2. Russia: ISBN 0-9550061-2-0.
27. D.S. Baldaev (2007-09-08). "Baldaev's Autobiography". Chanson museum. Retrieved 2007-12-15.
28. Clark, John (2007-09-09). "Viggo Mortensen digs into naked emotional turf". nydailynews.com. Retrieved 2007-12-19.

External links

• Official site
• Eastern Promises at IMDb
• Eastern Promises at Rotten Tomatoes
• Eastern Promises at Metacritic
• Eastern Promises at Box Office Mojo
• Template:Amg movie
• Eastern Promises movie trailer at Times Online
• David Cronenberg's Preparation for Directing Eastern Promises, an Amazon reference list

Interviews

• Film Comment interview with David Cronenberg
• Village Voice interview with Cronenberg
• GreenCine Daily interviews Cronenberg & Viggo Mortensen
• Viggo Mortensen interview
• Rotten Tomatoes Interview with Cronenberg and Mortensen 2007

• Films directed by David Cronenberg
• Gangster films
• 2007 films