Eastern Promises

Eastern Promises (from Weird and Wonderful II: Fifty More Cult Films by George Hughes, available from www.freefall-productions.com on 28/12/20)

2007 / UK / 100 minutes

“You belong in there, with nice people. Stay away from people like me.”

Director: David Cronenberg / Screenplay: Steven Knight / Director of Photography: Peter Suschitzky / Music: Howard Shore / Production: Robert Lantos and Paul Webster for Scion Films / Cast: Viggo Mortensen (Nikolai), Vincent Cassel (Kirill), Naomi Watts (Anna), Armin Mueller-Stahl (Semyon), Donald Sumpter (Yuri), Josef Altin (Ekrem), Jerzy Skolimowski (Stepan), Sinead Cusack (Helen), Tamer Hassan (Chechen). 

London, between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, 2006. Tatiana, an underage, undocumented Russian girl forced into prostitution and heroin addiction dies during childbirth but the baby survives. Anna (Naomi Watts), a half Russian midwife, finds a diary among the dead girl’s possessions. Although she can speak some Russian, Anna cannot read it so she gives the diary to her Uncle Stepan (Jerzy Skolimowski) to translate.

   The diary leads Anna to a Russian restaurant run by the seemingly pleasant and outwardly charming Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), who is really a high- ranking elder in the Vory v Zakone. Anna also briefly meets Semyon’s son, Kirill (Vincent Cassel), a volatile drunk and likely repressed homosexual, as well as their quiet and mysterious driver / bodyguard, Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen).

   As Semyon becomes aware that Tatiana’s diary contains incriminating evidence against him and Kirill about their sex trafficking operation in London, he becomes increasingly threatening towards Anna to get it back. But Anna begins to realise that Nikolai is subtly working to protect her and her family from his employers.

   However, Semyon has arranged for Nikolai to take Kirill’s place in an assassination set- up he’s been forced to arrange to protect his son from a vengeful gang of Chechens. Surviving the attack but badly wounded, Nikolai is rushed to the hospital where Anna works. There he is visited by a Met detective and reveals that he is actually a long- term undercover FSB agent embedded in the Russian Mafia.

   But with so many “Violent incidents now associated with him”, Nikolai’s superiors want him pulled out just as he’s been promoted to a level high enough to finally get some real results. He argues his case to stay undercover and continues to work to bring down Semyon and to save Anna, her family and Tatiana’s baby…

   After collaborating on the highly successful thriller A History of Violence in 2005, David Cronenberg and Mortensen had immediately started looking for another project to work on together. At the same time, British screenwriter Steven Knight (the future creator of Peaky Blinders) had been commissioned by the BBC to write a typically sensationalist UK television drama about people trafficking in London.

   But rather than churning out the expected bit of cheap titillation dressed up with some “Serious issues” credentials, Knight became more interested in the traffickers than the victims during his research and with Russian organised crime in particular. The project eventually became a feature script and Mortensen was instantly attracted to the role of Nikolai, a character almost the reverse of the role he’d played in A History of Violence.

   Cronenberg, who a decade earlier had been almost universally vilified by the British tabloid press during the controversy surrounding his adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s Crash (1996), was persuaded to work in the UK for the first time to join the production. And although Eastern Promises would mark the director’s second straight crime film in a row, it’s intensity and brutality still owes a fair bit to the “Body Horror” genre he’d made his name in.

   Tatiana’s death, the opening murder of a rival vor, Nikolai’s casual “Professional Processing” of the corpse and a terrifying bollock naked knife fight in a bathhouse are all incredibly shocking and expertly staged. Cronenberg also makes brilliant use of the unfamiliar London locations and the winter weather, giving the whole film a look and atmosphere as cold and dark as it’s subject matter.

   But as great as the supporting cast are, Eastern Promises is undeniably Mortensen’s film. Cool, threatening and darkly humorous, Nikolai feels unusually authentic. The reveal that he’s an agent is held onto for much longer than usual and- almost uniquely for such a character in film- his cover’s still entirely intact by the end, without even Anna finding out who he really is.

    Whilst the gangsters in the film are presented as still being completely independent from and generally contemptuous of the state, some Vory elements had started to work with the Russian regime by the time of it’s production (this is further explored in John le Carre’s 2009 novel Our Kind of Traitor and it’s 2016 film adaptation) and over the following decade London would be flooded with dirty oligarch money to be invested in permanently empty luxury apartment blocks and dodgy political donations.

    During filming, former KGB agent turned Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned just a few streets away from the locations in a very probable (although still not officially confirmed) FSB assassination. And to this day, the current British government continue to try to suppress any and all investigations into their Russian connections.

   At it’s core though, Eastern Promises is about the innocents caught up in this world. When Nikolai first tries to warn Anna off for her own protection, he tells her to stay in her safe, “Ordinary” world, to which Anna responds that Tatiana was an ordinary person until his employers got hold of her. Whilst Semyon is shown being genuinely affectionate towards his grandchildren and reminds Kirill to show respect to an elderly woman, these are people in the business of a modern day slave trade.

   Cassel is also outstanding as the conflicted Kirill, a “Prince” born into a life he’s not cut out for but still desperately trying to play the part he’s inherited. In the extremely uncomfortable scene in which he and Nikolai visit one of Semyon’s brothels, it becomes clear that neither of them want to be there any more than the girls- but everyone has to keep up appearances.

   Frustratingly, a planned sequel that would have followed Nikolai and Kirill on a trip to Russia was cancelled due to studio politics- although Cronenberg, Mortensen and Cassel have all expressed hope that the idea could be revived. But for British audiences, the modern London setting of Eastern Promises was one of it’s biggest selling points.

   By 2007, we’d had a decade of Guy Ritchie’s dodgy geezers in brown overcoats (already pretty dated even back when he started) so it was great to see a crime film set there that actually felt like the present day. And despite the best efforts of writers such as myself submitting more accurate depictions for years afterwards, we’ve only recently seen a modern capital- set crime thriller to rival Eastern Promises with Gareth Evans’s brilliant TV series, Gangs of London.