Eastern Promises: David Cronenberg

It usually doesn't take me very long to realize that I am watching a film that I will inevitably give a 10/10 score.  In most cases it only takes me about 15-20 minutes.  There are even some films, like The 400 Blows (1959), that I can tell within minutes of starting that I am witnessing something truly special. I guess it's a talent you develop when you watch over 300+ films every year.  This was not the case with David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises.  Cronenberg's film about the Russian Mafia in London and European sex trafficking didn't really grab my attention until about two-thirds of the way into its running time.  It started off like a standard, albeit unusually well photographed and acted, mafia movie.  A 14 year old Russian prostitute dies while giving birth to a baby girl.  Anna Khitrova, the British-Russian midwife who assists in the birth at a London hospital, discovers a diary and a business card for a Trans-Siberian restaurant among the dead girl's belongings.  Her Russian is poor, but she is able to learn that her name was Tatiana.  She gives the diary to her gloomy Ukranian uncle Stepan to translate. But before he can finish deciphering the diary, she travels to the Trans-Siberian restaurant to investigate why Titania had one of their cards. What she doesn't know is that the restaurant is owned by Semyon, an elderly vory (the equivalent of an Italian "Godfather") in the Russian Mafia.  When she returns home, she is horrified to discover from the freshly translated diary that Titania was a sex slave who was lured to England with promises of a better life only to be beaten, raped, forcibly addicted to heroin, and impregnated by Semyon and his son Kirill.  Things get even worse when Semyon orders his driver and body disposer Nikolai Luzhin to retrieve the diary and make their problem with Anna's family "disappear."  Incredibly, what I have just described is only the surface story. Underneath are subplots concerning power struggles between Semyon's organization and a rival Chechen gang, Kirill's attempts to gain his father's respect and power, the importance and iconography of prison tattoos within the Russian mafia, and the savage nature of London's criminal underground.  This is a movie of truly astonishing complexity and depth. I didn't even really realize how complicated this film's story was until about an hour in when I realized that I was juggling 4-5 subplots in my head. But even more amazingly, Cronenberg's direction and Steven Knight's screenplay balance all of the film's subplots without making any of them seem convoluted or confusing.  I previously said that I didn't realize that I was watching a 10/10 until about two-thirds of the way in. The reason is that after about an hour the plot suddenly swung in an unexpected direction that took me so violently by surprise that I'm amazed my head didn't fall off.  And yet, despite the cataclysmic twist, the plot development was handled with such finesse that it seemed like a natural extension of the story instead of a cheap director's ploy.  This movie truly left me in awe. Armin Mueller-Stahl's performance as Semyon is the stuff of legend.  In my book, he ranks alongside Don Vito Corleone, Tony Montana, and Tommy DeVito as one of the most fascinating, and terrifying, mafia bosses in cinematic history.  Viggo Mortensen gives the performance of his career as Nikolai Luzhin.  And finally, Eastern Promises features a fight scene in a Turkish bath that will one day be regarded as one of the greatest ever committed to film.  How good is it? In my opinion, it ranks with the hallway scene in Oldboy (2003), Bruce Lee vs. Chuck Norris in Way of the Dragon (1972), and the alleyway brawl in They Live (1988).  Eastern Promises is truly a film for the ages.

10/10