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Read on now for my favourite review of this great movie:

"David Cronenberg's latest is a fairly traditional gangster story. It's not too long, and it doesn't particularly have anything to say about the gangster genre the way GoodFellas or Miller's Crossing did. With less violence and graphic language and maybe filmed in black-and-white, it could have been released back in the 1940s. What makes it great is that it's a David Cronenberg movie; he tells a compelling story, filled with his own particular obsessions. It's personal, unpretentious and unassuming. It's basically what Manny Farber used to call an "Underground Movie," or the type of movie that doesn't call attention to itself, although it does contain its own sublime artistry.

Cronenberg's storytelling here is so subtle, and he immerses us into this world so completely, that it doesn't become clear for some time that we're in London, albeit a tucked-away corner occupied by Russian families. Anna Khitrova (Naomi Watts) works as a midwife at a hospital and lives with her mother (Sinéad Cusack) and her Uncle Stepan (Jerzy Skolimowski). When a 14 year-old pregnant girl comes to the hospital, Anna is able to save the baby, but not the girl, who remains unidentified, save for a diary written in Russian and the address of a restaurant. There she meets Seymon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), who -- unbeknownst to her -- runs a violent crime family. He butters her up with some real Russian cooking; her own family eats bad English food.

Seymon's son is Kirill (Vincent Cassel), an unstable, violent loon. Nikolai Luzhin (Viggo Mortensen) is charged with looking after him and driving him around, but also killing people from time to time. Nikolai is essential to the family, but still excluded from official functions like birthday parties. Thus the two outsiders, Nikolai and Anna, find a kind of uneasy bond. Even so, Anna's poking into the identity of the pregnant girl opens a few dangerous wounds.

Instantly, Eastern Promises looks like a Cronenberg film, and not just because it opens with a throat-slicing. It has an intelligent, deliberate pace and allows for questions about the human body. As with A History of Violence, this film has little to do with supernatural bonding of technology and flesh, but rather the problem of the flesh vs. the soul. Can the flesh, or the body, accurately represent who a person really is? Cronenberg directly addresses the question with the theme of tattoos. Each of the Russian thugs is decorated with designs that could have secret meanings, or even more than one meaning. One specific tattoo, a pair of stars located one on each shoulder, comes into play during the climax and perfectly illustrates this theme.

Eastern Promises is also Cronenberg's first real "food" movie, and he luxuriates in showing the richness and seductiveness of the Russian food, vs. the bland, junky quality of the regular English food consumed by Anna and her family. It's surprising that Cronenberg hasn't taken on a food theme before this, as it's another melding of flesh and manufactured, outside material.

Like A History of Violence, this new film will seem like a mature departure for Cronenberg, but mainly because it's not specifically a horror film. It's still riddled with violence and dark ideas (one particularly effective and memorable fight scene takes place between a naked Nikolai and two leather-clad thugs in a white tile bath house). But even so, it may be more inviting for moviegoers unfamiliar with or unwilling to tackle his more explicit films. It may or may not win any awards come December, but I'd be willing to single out Mueller-Stahl for a superb performance as the Godfather-like boss, as well as Mr. Cronenberg, who for my money is the greatest working film director alive".

Jeffrey Anderson

Combustible Celluloid

The new thriller reteaming acclaimed director David Cronenberg with his 'A History of Violence' leading man Viggo Mortensen, 'Eastern Promises' is written by Steve Knight (Academy Award-nominated screenwriter of Dirty Pretty Things).

As in the earlier film, director and star together explore the psyche, physicality, and fortunes of a man whose true nature may never be wholly revealed.

The mysterious and charismatic Russian-born Nikolai Luzhin (Mr. Mortensen) is a driver for one of London's most notorious organized crime families of Eastern European origin. The family itself is part of the Vory V Zakone criminal brotherhood. Headed by Semyon (Academy Award nominee Armin Mueller-Stahl), whose courtly charm as the welcoming proprietor of the plush Trans-Siberian restaurant impeccably masks a cold and brutal core, the family's fortunes are tested by Semyon's volatile son and enforcer, Kirill (Vincent Cassel), who is more tightly bound to Nikolai than to his own father.

But Nikolai's carefully maintained existence is jarred once he crosses paths at Christmastime with Anna Khitrova (Academy Award nominee Naomi Watts), a midwife at a North London hospital. Anna is deeply affected by the desperate situation of a young teenager who dies while giving birth to a baby. Anna resolves to try to trace the baby's lineage and relatives. The girl's personal diary also survives her; it is written in Russian, and Anna seeks answers in it.

Anna's mother Helen (Sinéad Cusack) does not discourage her, but Anna's irascible Russian-born uncle Stepan (Jerzy Skolimowski) urges caution. He is right to do so; by delving into the diary, Anna has accidentally unleashed the full fury of the Vory.

With Semyon and Kirill closing ranks and Anna pressing her inquiries, Nikolai unexpectedly finds his loyalties divided. The family tightens its grip on him; who can, or should, he trust? Several lives - including his own - hang in the balance as a harrowing chain of murder, deceit, and retribution reverberates through the darkest corners of both the family and London itself.

Although the version of the film I saw in July was unfinished (Cronenberg was still mixing the sound at the time of the interview below), it left me literally shaking but also feeling that I now possessed secret knowledge. And knowledge, no matter how terrible, is power.

AT: How did you get involved with Eastern Promises?

DC: The script was developed at the BBC under David Thompson. It was very different when I first read it, but the characters and the subculture were all there. It was written by Steve Knight, who wrote Dirty Pretty Things for Stephen Frears. And it's obvious he has a good feel for embedded subcultures, which is something that appeals to me too. Those strangely enclosed little worlds where rules are made up and become like the laws of nature. I was intrigued by that very intense hothouse climate.

It's the first film you shot entirely outside of Canada. What was it like working in London?

It was good because the crew was good and the producers made me feel as supported as you can possibly be, and I brought most of my heads of department with me. But once I start shooting, wherever I am just becomes a big film set. Talk about a subculture-when you're shooting you're barely aware of anything else. Although the polonium poisoning happened just down the street from me so I couldn't ignore that. When we started, the subject of the Russian mob in London was not particularly in the news, but pretty soon it became radioactively hot. Not that it's exactly the same subject as the movie, but it is connected.

Like most of your movies, this one pivots on the question of identity. Viggo Mortensen's character, Nikolai, has his identity literally written on his body in the form of the tattoos he got in a Russian prison.

Viggo does incredible research on his own. When we started, he sent me this two-volume book, Russian Criminal Tattoos. And a friend of his, Alix Lambert, had done a documentary about Russian prison tattoos called The Mark of Cain. So they became the focus of our intense rewriting. Steve Knight had alluded to tattoos, but in the rewrites we brought that forward, and it gave the story a real visual and metaphorical center. And then there's such a wealth of books about modern Russia and the disaster it is in so many ways. All of those things were fed into our production.

The fact that Nikolai's story has been coded onto his flesh is part of what makes the fight in the steam bath so extraordinary. How did the original script describe the scene?

The script said, "Two men come in with knives and there's a fight." The question of whether Viggo is naked or not isn't addressed. And of course the details of the choreography are not in the script. That is the work of many months working with the actors, and with Carol Spier, the production designer, and with the stunt coordinator. If I had had an actor who wouldn't play it naked, I would have had to shoot it with a towel around him, which would have been pretty silly, or I would have had to shoot it in a very restrained way. But for Viggo, there was no question. He said, "I have to do it naked." That freed me to do it the way it had to be done. It took three days to shoot, but planning went on constantly. Every week, we'd work on it and refine it more and more. Viggo got really bruised. He didn't tell me, but the makeup people did. They had to keep covering his bruises.

I found a piece that someone had posted on Ain't It Cool News about having seen a preview of the film.

Was it the guy who was obsessed with Viggo's balls?

I don't know if I performed an act of repression, but I don't remember seeing his balls.

You do see them. It's just that they go by rather quickly.

Right. I meant I didn't notice them in particular.

It wasn't like there was a close-up of them. But this guy was obsessed. He even wrote "big hairy balls." Well, that's one way of looking at it. They're definitely there, as you would imagine, but it's only if you're looking for them that that's what you see. Because mostly he's shot in full figure. So when people decide to run the DVD frame by frame, they are going to see everything at one point or another. Of course, a lot of the time it's going to be slightly blurred because he's in motion.

by Amy Taubin