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Articles and Reviews
Excellent articles with David Cronenberg, reviews and Viggo.
You need to know, there is a major plot point revealed especially in the first one that you have probably not seen before. Articles now are revealing more of the plot, so beware of:
***SPOILERS***
David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen and the Hard Work of Killing
Source: Greencine.com
David Cronenberg has long been fascinated with the liminal properties of human skin. He recognizes the body as a site of potential transformation. In his earlier films (Shivers, Rabid, The Brood), he rendered horror as a venereal process of invasive and rabid infection. Over the course of his filmography, he has charted the body's intimate liaison with technology (Videodrome, The Fly, eXistenZ) and has intelligently underscored the transgressive (and often horrifying) elements of physical change.
In recent years, his approach has become more psychological if not more naturalistic. He no longer needs to configure agencies of change as parasites erupting from within, bursting through the liminality of the skin. With calm exactitude and a stern eye, he suggests that the propensity for violence within each individual is the truest source of transgression, albeit hidden and disguised beneath the skin, if not within the constructions of biography. With A History of Violence he stunned audiences with how thin the veneer of civilization truly is and how the past will hunt and reveal you. In his most recent effort - Eastern Promises - he collaborates once again with A History of Violence leading man Viggo Mortensen to notate inherent violence (the marketing slogan says "sin") as marked on the skin through a criminalized system of initiatory tattoos. Intrigued by this driving narrative metaphor, I met up with Cronenberg and Mortensen at the Ritz Carlton during a recent visit to San Francisco. Our conversation necessarily contains some spoilers, so please be wary.
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I don't want to appear too pandering, David, but I have to admit that, though I interview directors all the time, you have been on my top five wish list for a long time.
David Cronenberg: Thank you.
Viggo Mortensen: Probably number five. [Laughter.]
Cronenberg: We don't want to say.
Mortensen: Who's number one?
I like Guillermo del Toro quite a lot.
Cronenberg: Oh, but I do, too! He's a good friend, a terrific guy and very funny.
I can actually say that I've grown up with your films, David. I've been watching them since Shivers. So there are some basic general themes I've long wanted to talk to you about.
Cronenberg: Okay.
I was a student of the mythologist Joseph Campbell. Joe, at a very early age, taught me to compare mythologies and gave me an assignment at one time, which was to study all the creation myths. One common theme that I found that interested me was the culpability of human skin. The reason for this being that humans are said to be created from earth, and the surface of the earth - in many of these ancients myths - is the skin of a vanquished race. Either Tiamat in Sumerian-Babylonian mythology or the Titans in Greek mythology or, if you want to get scientific about it, the slag of celestial explosions. Inherent in the human skin is this hint of ancient conflict or violence.
Mortensen: Except for Lithuanians. They're not a part of that. [Chuckles.]
Cronenberg: He's alluding to my background.
It seems to me in your films there is this awareness of the culpable liminality of human skin and, though I know most people describe your films as horror or sci-fi, I don't really think of them as being limited to those genres; for me, your films are more archetypal, psychological. They follow mythic templates. Especially moreso in your recent films like A History of Violence and now Eastern Promises, where these themes have become truly sophisticated and subtle. In Eastern Promises tattooed skin becomes primary and significant. Could the two of you talk about where that metaphor came from?
Cronenberg: Sure. Of course, when you're making a film, you don't think thematically. You're thinking very physically and pragmatically and emotionally; but, not in abstract ways because, as I've said many times, you can't photograph an abstract concept and an actor can't play an abstract concept. You have to get very specific, even though it's by being very specific that you can then be universal. Each character has to come from some place. He has to have a name. It's only in allegory that you get a character who plays an abstract concept; that you get a character who plays pride or humility or shame.
When it comes to the tattooing, it wasn't really very prominent in the original script that Steve [Knight] and I wrote. It was alluded to, but it wasn't developed in a full way. It was actually Viggo, doing his research - we had already agreed we were doing the movie - who came up with a book called Russian Criminal Tattoo, which is a fantastic book, quite mindblowing really. It was about the whole tattooing subculture in Russian prisons. That immediately triggered off for us the substance behind this character [Nikolai Luzhin], where he would have come from - or at least pretended he came from, of course, as it turns out - and that whole kind of life that he had and that whole ritual structure based on tattooing as identification, certification of your identity, authentication.
I sent that book and a documentary that Viggo found as well called The Mark of Cain - which is really fantastic, shot in Russian prisons with prisoners showing their tattoos and describing what they mean and so on - I sent that to Steve Knight and said, "This will blow your mind." [As if] the script had almost been waiting for this last piece of the puzzle to become the central metaphor of the movie and to make everything gel around it. As I say, we were already launched on making the movie but this wasn't originally in it.
It's interesting that you bring up a documentary entitled The Mark of Cain because, lapsed Catholic that I am, that's exactly what I thought of. Of course it's obvious that the mark God laid on Cain is the original tattoo.
Cronenberg: That's right and that documentary, of course, alluded to that as well.
In Eastern Promises there's a reference to "forced" tattoos. What's meant by that?
Mortensen: There's a caste system, not just in Russia but in prisons in this country as well. If you're a pederast, if you're a child molester, if you're a homosexual; there are certain kinds of crimes in Russian prisons that count against you and that limit you in the hierarchy in the prison, no matter how loyal you might be, how tough you might be, how much of a survivor, how much of a good fighter you might be, a good thief or whatever...
Cronenberg: Basically, to cut to the chase, they force you to have tattoos that identify you as such.
Mortensen: They hold you down and tattoo you. Or if you're a stool pigeon, they'll tattoo a rat on you on your forehead.
Cronenberg: So these are tattoos that you have not agreed to have. They will hold you down and put them on you. It's like someone stamping something in your passport saying, "Do not allow this person to come into the country."
Mortensen: Or you're forced to wear a yellow star or something; but it's on your body.
Within the structure of the film, then, do you feel that the strategy by which Nikolai gains his stars is a forced tattooing?
Cronenberg: No, not at all.
Mortensen: That's a great honor.
Cronenberg: That's something he would aspire to. It's something Nikolai would desire. When Semyon [Armin Mueller-Stahl] says, "It's time you joined us," Nikolai says, "Thank you, Papa." It's like becoming a made man in the mafia. It's becoming accepted as "one of us," a man to be trusted, and this is indicated by these stars [on his chest] and on [his] knees; that's [his] mark of acceptance and authentication, that [he's] a guy to be trusted. Now, if [he] should end up in prison again, he would have great status in that prison hierarchy because of those stars. In those prisons, if you fake a tattoo, if you just put those [stars] on and they find out, it's not very nice what happens after that.
Mortensen: You get killed or the old school guys come up to you and say, "On your finger it says you were in St. Petersburg Prison; but, I happen to know you never were there. Get rid of that tattoo. I'll give you 20 minutes and we'll be back and - if it's not gone..."
Cronenberg: "We're going to take your finger off, or your hand, so that you won't have that tattoo."
Mortensen: So you burn it off, you cut it off, with whatever you can find.
Cronenberg: It's pretty brutal.
Nikolai's Mephistophelian contract in Eastern Promises is handsomely and elegantly measured, even though it's quite troubling and disturbing. Despite the violent things that he does, I don't think of him as a criminal and I'm conflicted about feeling that way. You've successfully made his moral dilemma one we can empathize with, albeit reluctantly. He's redeemed somewhat by his secrets.
Cronenberg: He is assuming the role of criminal as a chauffeur to [Semyon's] son [and] has to then be witness to crimes. You see him cutting the fingers off [a corpse] because it's something he does. He's helping his boss, his commander, which is Kirill [Vincent Cassel]. So he does commit criminal acts. If there was a bust of that crime family, he would definitely be busted because it would be obvious that he had at least witnessed crimes that he didn't report. He would have to have committed some crimes himself -
Mortensen: To fit in. What you can say in a broad sense about all the characters, not just mine, but Naomi [Watts]'s character, Armin Mueller-Stahl's character, even Vincent's character, is that - like in A History of Violence and like in most of [David's] movies - like in life, once someone makes a movie thoughtfully and intelligently as [David] does and most directors don't, people are never what they seem at first, and you never really get to know them fully. At the end of Eastern Promises, you wonder what else there is to my character and other characters and you wonder what's going to happen. Tomorrow is going to be complicated. What's going to happen to these poor people?
The final image of Nikolai is unsettling for being enigmatic. You say it's an honor for Nikolai to receive these tattoo stars, you say it is something he would strive for, and yet it is likewise repulsive and horrifying. When he reveals them to Yuri [Donald Sumpter], Yuri winces and recoils.
Cronenberg: He's gone over a line. There's no coming back, in a way.
Mortensen: The unspoken thing from Yuri is, "Well, we'll make use of you as long as we can, but there may be a point where you're totally on your own, and there might be a time when we are on the wrong side of the fence from each other completely, and I can't vouch for you and won't know anything about you. If I have to, I'll arrest you."
One of my favorite lines in the film is when Nikolai says, "You play with a prince to do business with a king." That line is Shakespearean.
Cronenberg: Yes.
Which leads me to ask about the dynamic between Kirill and Nikolai. You mentioned earlier that, if you are a homosexual, you would have no chance to advance in this hierarchy and yet, somehow, there's this tension being posed that, as Nikolai assumes the role of Kirill's father, he's subverting the old patriarchy with a more accommodating patriarchy. How did that energy come about?
Mortensen: It was practical on one level.
Cronenberg: Yeah. It's obvious that Kirill is in love with Nikolai. He can't really admit to himself that he's gay because he would have no credibility. As the son of the boss, it would be an embarrassment to the whole organization. Nikolai knows this and uses it. He manipulates Kirill for his own purposes.
But not without affection.
Mortensen: Well, there is a certain tenderness and that speaks to the thing of, you never fully know. You don't really know how close they actually are.
Cronenberg: That's exactly right. Kirill is a floppy, irresponsible, crazy kid, and Nikolai's like the responsible brother, and there is some kind of strange affection between them; but is that only manipulative? You don't really know. It's hard to know how genuine that is. Nikolai would be capable of portraying that without it being true; but you don't know. And it could be both. It could be manipulative and genuine at the same time because, of course, in relationships that happens, too. Semyon, of course, represents the old school, the old Vory, with a rigid, as you say, patriarchal understanding of the way things work.
Mortensen: That's why he is so devastated when Nikolai finally says, "This is what people are saying." He probably knows [the truth about Kirill]; but hearing it from Nikolai confirms his worst fears. He's not very happy, obviously.
Cronenberg: And the truth is, of course, if Nikolai takes over or supplants Semyon, we don't know where that will place Kirill who is the [true] prince. Is he supplanted totally by Nikolai? Or does Nikolai still have to be the man behind the throne?
Mortensen: Making Kirill feel like he's in charge.
Cronenberg: Like he's the boss.
That's how I read it. Again, referencing Shakespeare, Nikolai seemed like Iago behind Othello.
Cronenberg: But still manipulate him emotionally in every other way because Nikolai's much more calculated and controlled as well about those things and about people. It puts Nikolai in a very interesting, strange place in his life.
Clearly the scene everyone is going to be talking about in this film is the bathhouse sequence, which is such a brave and committed scene for both of you to have taken on, but especially you, Viggo. The violence in that scene is fiercely naturalistic and I felt you upped Guillermo del Toro's half-chelsea from Pan's Labyrinth. Just when I thought I had seen it all with the rip of Guillermo's half-chelsea, this bathhouse scene comes up. How did you structure the violence? What are you wanting to say about violence? Are you texturing the violence through the audience's vulnerability?
Cronenberg: Yes. The nudity in the scene is really about vulnerability; it's not sex. Most nudity in movies has a sexual aspect. Not that this doesn't maybe have some of that as well; but, it's much more sublimated. I've only recently been talking about it - because it just occurred to me - that it's like the shower scene in Psycho. You're naked, you're wet and there's some people with knives who don't like you. This is a very vulnerable kind of thing that people can relate to. Of course, it's all set up properly because of the tattoos that you meet there, so people can see the tattoos and see that it's all legitimate, and then it goes quite wrong.
I said to the stunt coordinator and the camera man, "This is not Bourne-like impressionistic cutting away, where you don't see anything. Violence is physical. It's all about bodies. It's about the destruction of bodies. And I insist on that as the reality of this. And I want to see it all. This fight scene has to make physiological sense. It has to make mechanical sense. It has to make body sense."
If an audience is seeing a movie to live another life - which I think is one of the attractions of seeing movies; you get to be out of your own life and live some other life that maybe you [wouldn't] ever really want to live but you're curious about - so, I'm saying, if you're a Nikolai in the movie, then you're going to experience this; I'm not going to throw it away, do it off camera, and do it frivolously. All the hard work and the difficulty of killing someone, if that's what this character has to do, I want you to feel it and see it.
I saw the film in an audience of jaded critics who were all squirming around like earthworms on a hot griddle.
Cronenberg: Then it worked! That's great!
Eastern Promises: Think shower scene in Psycho
Source: Macleans.ca
"And the two throat-cuttings are very quick. You could include the finger-snipping, but the guy's dead so it doesn't really count."
Leaving aside the question of whether trimming a corpse's fingers with a pair of pruning shears counts, the scene in Eastern Promises that's causing all the buzz is a bathhouse fight, in which a naked and visibly exposed Viggo Mortensen hurtles through a bout of bloody combat with two knife-wielding attackers. After an advance screening of the film, a colleague turned to me and said, "Nothing you've read about that scene can prepare you for it." When I relay the comment to Cronenberg, he says, "That's a good sign. Not that we intended it, but this is shaping up to be like the shower scene in Psycho, the scene that will get them to see the movie. It would be good if they can hear about it and still not have it spoiled for them."
A director who forged his reputation by inventing his own genre of biological horror now appears to be reinventing the mob movie. And he's on a roll. Eastern Promises, which opens Sept. 14, is one of the most keenly anticipated movies amid an armada of major premieres being launched at next week's Toronto International Film Festival. It comes two years after A History of Violence (2005), which resurrected Cronenberg's career after a long stretch of box-office oblivion ("I'm suddenly hot again for about 10 minutes"). And once again it's a gangster movie starring Mortensen as a soft-spoken hero with a secret life and a knack for vicious brutality.
Despite the obvious similarities, they're very different films. Based on a graphic novel, A History of Violence plays like a western, a fable of men in black shattering the calm of a small American town. The new movie, set in a London enclave of the Russian mafia, is grounded in meticulous research and riddled with Old World intrigue. It lacks the moral and political resonance of History, which eviscerated myths of American heroism. But as a pure thriller, Eastern Promises is a stronger, more plausible drama. And for Cronenberg it marks another departure.
Remarkably, with his 18th feature, this 64-year-old iconoclast is still continuing to evolve as a filmmaker, tattooing his distinctive signature onto fresh terrain. And while his work shows little sign of compromise, it has become a lot more accessible. Eastern Promises, a US$27-million Canada-U.K.-U.S. production, is the most realistic piece he has ever directed. Though laced with subversion, it's also his most conventional. Mortensen's Russian mobster is drop-dead cool, a tall drink of vodka with glimmers of Clint Eastwood, James Dean and James Bond. At stake is the fate of an adorable newborn baby, an odd apparition in a Cronenberg film. And the redemptive ending verges on happy -- even if the director prefers to call it "bittersweet."
Scripted by British screenwriter Steve Knight (Dirty Pretty Things), the story is about a motorbike-riding midwife named Anna (Naomi Watts), who works at a north London hospital. She gets mixed up with the Russian mafia while trying to trace the identity of a baby born to a raped 14-year-old sex slave. The young mother, who dies in childbirth, has left a diary, which leads Anna to a Russian restaurant owned by an aging crime boss (Armin Mueller-Stahl). She then becomes enmeshed in a lethal intrigue involving the boss's dissolute son (Vincent Cassel), who's a closeted homosexual, and the son's chauffeur/enforcer, Nikolai (Mortensen), a mysterious ex-con rising in the ranks of the vory v zakone criminal brotherhood. Aside from the eruptions of violence, this must be one of the quietest, most tender gangster films ever made. And there are at least two subtextual romances -- one straight, one gay -- running through it, like underground streams.
Asked how he ended up making two mob movies with Mortensen back-to-back, Cronenberg insists it was "a complete accident -- there were many other films that floated by." The only other lead actor he's cast twice is Jeremy Irons, his star in Dead Ringers and M. Butterfly. In fact, given that Irons played twins in Dead Ringers, and Mortensen played the split personae of Tom/Joey in A History of Violence, you could say Cronenberg cast both of them three times. But the director admits he has tried to reignite relationships with a number of his previous male leads, including Christopher Walken (The Dead Zone), James Woods (Videodrome), James Spader (Crash) and Ralph Fiennes (Spider). "I've tried to do movies with all of them -- it's not for lack of trying. You have a relationship. You've done all the basics. So it means you can build and start again at a higher level."
For years, every Cronenberg movie had its own peculiar DNA. Even as he strayed from science fiction to portray gothic gynecologists in Dead Ringers and car-wreck fetishists in Crash, their worlds still seemed wholly invented. And now that he's plying a more familiar genre, he still refuses to admit that he's referencing other movies, including his own. His two sequential mob movies, he insists, are unrelated. "That's not to say that when the smoke clears we can't see they would be an interesting double bill. But when you're making the movie, you're not thinking about your last movie -- or anyone else's movie."
But in making a gangster picture, how can you not reference a genre that's so indelibly branded by Coppola, Scorsese and The Sopranos? Sure, Eastern Promises takes place in a different world -- an English hothouse of Russian cutthroats, not a neighbourhood of New Jersey wise guys. But when we see Mueller-Stahl's ruthless crime boss offering a taste of his beloved borscht or sweetly showing some children how to make a violin weep, it's hard not to be reminded of Brando's Godfather amid his tomato plants.
Continued Below
"I didn't even think about it," says Cronenberg. "Not that Armin isn't Godfatherish. But all monsters are sentimental. Stalin would be like that too. It's got its basis in reality rather than in other movies."
In fact, Knight's script is based on intensive research into the international sex trade. Mortensen spent weeks in Russia, immersed himself in the language, and met with Russian gangsters. There were also Russian extras on the set who claimed to be bodyguards and chauffeurs. "Yet they were wearing Armani and driving Mercedes," says Cronenberg, "so I think we had subliminal consultation."
Mortensen, meanwhile, was more than an actor. He put a fresh spin on the script by discovering a book, Russian Criminal Tattoo, and a documentary, The Mark of Cain, about the tattooing subculture in Russian prisons. Cronenberg sent them to the screenwriter, saying, "You're going to want to incorporate a lot of this because it's mind-blowing." Tattooing became a key element of the story. And, branded with this coded mutilation of the flesh, the movie became instantly more Cronenbergian. "I don't look for these things consciously," he says. "But if you keep your pores open, and invite collaboration, that's the great kind of stuff that can happen."
Famous for being far more mild-mannered than his movies, Cronenberg's own body is tattoo-free. "In the Jewish religion, if you have tattoos, you can't be buried on hallowed ground. As an atheist that doesn't really matter to me. I've just never had the urge, although I did a photo shoot with my daughter in which I had a fake tattoo put on, taken from Russian Criminal Tattoo. And I must say, I was kind of reluctant to wash it off."
Cronenberg is a kind of tattoo artist in his own right. His films get under the skin and don't wash off. They also leave an indelible mark on his actors. Irons saw his career undergo an almost surgical transformation in the director's hands, as he matured from matinee idol to serious actor. Now, using Mortensen's ripped body as a living lab experiment, Cronenberg has re-engineered the icon of the Hollywood action hero -- and filmed images of a naked, knife-fighting Viggo that will be tattooed into cyberspace. (Every actor now thinks twice about nudity, knowing that any genital shots can be captured from a DVD and uploaded to the Internet.)
The nudity was a matter of sheer pragmatism, says Cronenberg. "It took about 10 seconds to decide. We were working on the choreography and Viggo said, 'Well, it's obvous I'm going to have to do this naked.' And I said, 'Okay, great.' And that's it. The screenwriter didn't consider it. It was left to us to figure all those things out. Viggo knew the style of the movie. It's meant to be very realistic and body-conscious. Not like the Bourne movies where you get impressionistic cutting and you don't know what's really gone on. I wanted to show everything. The body -- that's what I make movies about. I'm shooting an actor who's acting with his body."
It's hard to think of another scene of naked combat in a mainstream movie, unless you go back to that bit of gentlemanly wrestling in Women in Love (1969). So even in this, Cronenberg's most straightforward thriller, taboos fall. There's a sense that his originality is forged as the camera rolls, regardless of whether he wrote the script. "Once you're on the set," he says, "it doesn't matter where the script came from. You have to make two or three thousand decisions a day that are unique to you. You have to feel close enough to what you're doing, excited enough, that you will mix your blood with it."
The Cronenberg tattoo has left a mark on pop culture that often exceeds his reach at the box office. His viral innovations in the horror genre continue to replicate decades later. And while it may be coincidence, the final ragged scene of The Sopranos, with the family staring into the abyss across the dinner table, is reminiscent of the final scene in A History of Violence. But Cronenberg wouldn't know. He gave up on The Sopranos long ago. "It made me crazy," he says. "I know it's good. I just found the characters stupid and brutal. As much as I appreciated the artistry, I couldn't watch them."
And don't get him started on fellow Canadian filmmaker Paul Haggis, who swiped the title of his own inimitable Crash, winning Best Picture with an Oscar nomination most critics felt deserved to go to A History of Violence. "Now, Paul, there's a guy who has real cred in Hollywood," says Cronenberg. "I think they're still a bit wary of me. Nobody's throwing a $100-million movie at me, let's put it that way. But if you saw the stuff I've turned down, things I could have made a lot of money doing, you wouldn't worry about my integrity."
Continued Below
So just what will Cronenberg say if he runs into Haggis next week at the Toronto film festival, where Haggis is premiering In the Valley of Elah? "I've said many things to him. He knows my attitude, that I'm very mad at him, but how long can I keep that up? I will say, 'Hello, Paul, I'm going to call my next movie The Valley of Elah.' "
Then they can take it into the steam bath.
Eastern Promises
Source: Movie Guy
David Cronenberg has the most socially-aware fetish for carnage in Hollywood.
He is the man who savagely blew away half of Ed Harris’ face to show America’s infatuation with violence, brutally turned Jeff Goldblum into a fly to express man’s disease of being finite, and showed James Spader becoming sexually aroused by violent car crashes to show, from the point of view of that disease, man’s finite vices are fertilizing rather than destructive.
He is a director who, for over forty years, has soaked his conscious social commentary with blood and gore -- and, in doing so, has created one of the most impressive resume of films of any director working in Hollywood today. Through his brutally unique style, he simply makes our vices more feasibly accessible rather than simply exploiting and condemning them. He raises questions but lets the audience answer them.
In the rainy alleys of London’s darkest corners, Cronenberg raises his newest questions with his new mesmerizing thriller, Eastern Promises. The film, Cronenberg’s latest offering of audience-accessible thrillers (following 2005’s A History of Violence), tells the complex story of an innocent midwife (Naomi Watts) who becomes entangled in the treacherous web of deceit and murder of a ruthless organized crime family and the family’s mysteriously savage driver, Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen), who is ordered to deal with her potentially dangerous findings.
One of Cronenberg’s most mature and captivating films to date, Eastern Promises is a poor man’s Godfather -- it’s a darker, grittier, nastier and more violent alternative to Francis Ford Coppola’s mafia classic. Though it might miss the epic grandeur of The Godfather, Cronenberg makes no excuses for his savage mobsters -- they are brutally soulless monsters, creating a terrifying realism that remains inescapable from start to finish.
Still, the film is smart and compelling with every intricate plot twist and unexpected character development. Cronenberg not only manages to flesh out each character, he fleshes out each moment, providing chilling moments that haunt you long after you’ve left the theater. As always, Cronenberg finds a flawless balance between graphic violence and his social commentary, this particular time, on the complexity of today’s modern society. He never jumps back and forth between the two, instead making one support the other. Working together mutually, he makes both elements seamless.
As always, Cronenberg’s films rest on the rock of multiple solid performances from great actors at the top of their game. Most noticeably, Viggo Mortensen as the quietly timid yet dangerously terrifying mob driver Nikolai, gives an Oscar caliber performance of both restrained humility and fear. When you look into Mortensen’s eyes, you’re convinced that he’s come to terms with the fact that he’s condemned to eternal damnation and is living his life accordingly. His performance is chilling and mesmerizing, perhaps the greatest of his career. Naomi Watts disappears behind the fearful apprehension of the innocent midwife who becomes more and more entangled in the web of murder and lies as the seconds tick by. Both Vincent Cassel and Armin Mueller-Stahl turn in stellar performances, holding their own and proving that this movie belongs to neither Mortensen or Watts -- this is an ensemble piece. Without any one of these pieces, the work as a whole would be incomplete.
Cronenberg’s latest is one more in the long line of his relentlessly brutal social commentaries that allows the audience to step back and try to separate themselves from the monsters on screen -- and then relishes in their horror when they realize they can’t. With every drop of blood, Eastern Promises also relishes (like all of Cronenberg’s work) in the purity of our own sinful vices. He proves that, in the end, no matter how hard you scrub the blood off your hands at the end of the day, no sin ever really goes away. Every sin comes back to haunt you.
Every sin leaves a mark.
Space Cases
Source: New Yorker Review
Where does David Cronenberg, born in Canada, belong? From the start, his movies have offered a guided tour of the geography of the body, pointing out local highlights such as the uterus, the stomach, and the armpit. Wider locations do less to arouse his interest. The focus of “Dead Ringers” (1988) was squarely, and squirmingly, on the operating theatre in which his heroes toiled, not on the Toronto where they lived, and although the small-town setting of his previous film, “A History of Violence” (2005), was lovingly detailed, Cronenberg had no hesitation in breaking camp, halfway through, and shifting the story elsewhere. Then, there is London—the sombre, fraying patchwork through which Cronenberg picked his way in “Spider” (2002), and to which he now returns in “Eastern Promises.” To say that he looks at home there would be stretching a point; rather, he has found a place that he can remold—both heightening and darkening the real thing—to his dreadful satisfaction.
Viggo Mortensen, who starred in “A History of Violence,” appears here in a very different role, and it may be that the director has found his muse. Mortensen, armed with those scary chiselled cheekbones and deep-set, easily wounded eyes, delivers just the ratio of machine to mortal that Cronenberg requires—the Dietrich to his von Sternberg, you might say. In “Eastern Promises,” Mortensen plays Nikolai, an expatriate Russian. He was once a prisoner in Siberia, and has the tattoos to prove it; he even sports them on his knuckles, like Robert Mitchum in “The Night of the Hunter.” These days, Nikolai is a chauffeur in London, although he is also referred to as “the undertaker.” In practice, this means doing the dirty work for Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), a restaurateur with fingers in many unpalatable pies, and for Semyon’s son Kirill (Vincent Cassel), a cringer almost too weak for wickedness.
Cassel is French, Mueller-Stahl is German, and Mortensen is Danish-American; of the three, only the last makes a convincing Russian. Just to thicken the mixture, the Australian actress Naomi Watts plays Anna, a half-British woman whose late father was Russian. She lives with her mother (Sinéad Cusack) and works as a midwife in a London hospital. There she delivers a baby girl from a young Russian mother who dies in childbirth, leaving a diary. Inside is a card for Semyon’s restaurant. Anna tracks him down; he receives her warmly, but those blue eyes of his are about as welcoming as a glacier, and she is soon stuck fast in the schemes of Russian mobsters, as well as those of their delightful Chechen counterparts.
In truth, “Eastern Promises” has felt nasty from the opening scene—a man seated in a barber’s chair, with darkness descending outside. You could match it with a similar scene in Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1969 “Army of Shadows,” which was released here last year; both directors stoke up the pressure as calmly as someone putting a kettle on to boil. The difference is that for Melville the menace is sufficient unto itself—the guy ends up with nothing worse than a close shave—whereas Cronenberg has to cap it with a spurt of gore. Violence is to threat, in his movies, as punch line is to joke: a source of glee to his fans, although with every year I find it less amusing. Does it honestly drive home the malice of Semyon, Nikolai, and their rivals to see a knife blade gouging a throat, or does the image not pride itself on its flourish of Guignol and thus divert attention from the main business of “Eastern Promises,” which is to delve into the spiritual sump where these characters live?
The tension comes to a head in the Turkish-bath scene—without doubt the best Turkish-bath scene, for connoisseurs of what is admittedly a limited genre, since the murder of Roderigo in Orson Welles’s “Othello.” Welles used towels and steam because he lacked money for costumes, whereas Cronenberg uses even less—hardly a breath of steam and soon no towels at all—because he wants Mortensen to scrap and swipe for his life with nothing on. This is good news, not just for Viggo fanciers (a panting band, since “The Lord of the Rings”) but because it overlaps with the other unclad bodies in the film—the baby girl, plus a crooning Russian whore with whom Nikolai is forced at one point to couple. Now he, too, is as naked as a newborn: a bare, forked animal defending himself against a pair of Chechen thugs. Given that the male nude was a staple of Western art from Praxiteles, in the fourth century B.C., up to Rodin, its absence from movies—other than pornography—has been a grave and prudish waste, and Nikolai’s struggle in “Eastern Promises” is an astounding set piece of savagery and vulnerability. Even here, though, Cronenberg overplays his hand, with a shot of a sickle blade slicing into an eye; the balance is tipped, and the scene is spoiled. Why go that far? Must he cling to his schlocky reputation at all costs?
The irony is that, under the carnage, “Eastern Promises” is an old-fashioned picture, not just in the cautious, near-sedate motions of the camera but in its urge to pluck innocence from the embrace of evil, and to dispense punishment to those who warrant it most. The screenplay is by Steve Knight, who wrote “Dirty Pretty Things,” and his impulse to probe the multiracial London of today—in particular, the influx from the former Eastern bloc—is a laudable one, yet the outcome reminded me of nothing so much as late Dickens. When we see Nikolai and Kirill slinging a body into the coffee-colored Thames, or Anna, much later, cradling the baby in the same spot, like a blond protecting angel, we are back with Gaffer Hexam and his saintly daughter Lizzie, trawling the same river for the dumped and the drowned at the start of “Our Mutual Friend.”
TIFF Day 4: Eastern Promises, Religulous, Souffle
Source: Cinema Blend
Day 4 was one big film-noir sandwich and my best day at the festival thus far. The morning started off great when David Cronenberg actually showed up at 9 AM to introduce his latest film, Eastern Promises. He didn’t have much to say and I’m pretty sure he was still half asleep, but it always adds a little extra to have the director introduce his work in person. Next up was a special in which Bill Maher and Larry Charles presented a few extended clips from their upcoming mockumentary Religulous, and then remained on stage for an hour-long conversation with the audience. Needless to say, hilarity ensued and I’m especially glad I chose to grab tickets to that event. My third feature was another successful noir called Le Deuxieme Souffle, which capped a perfect day and the first time that I thoroughly enjoyed every film I saw.
Eastern Promises
Continuing in the vein of A History of Violence, David Cronenberg’s latest film Eastern Promises is a smartly crafted thriller with his familiar touches of grisly violence. What makes Cronenberg’s grim sequences so profound is that they are so perfectly placed and cautiously used that they act as expressions of theme and atmosphere rather than simply death scenes. The shifty world of organized crime has long been perfected by Martin Scorsese, but with this film Cronenberg has once again succeeded in seamlessly weaving mafia dealings around the lives of ordinary people, creating something much different than Goodfellas, Casino or even The Departed.
Set entirely in London and revolving around a division of the Russian Mafia, Eastern Promises begins with midwife Anna (Naomi Watts) delivering the baby of a fourteen year-old prostitute named Tatiana. When the mother dies giving birth, Anna fears for the livelihood of the child, and with no more than Tatiana’s diary she is forced to try and find a proper home for the child. When she discovers a business card stuffed in the diary, Anna decides to visit the Russian restaurant in hopes that they know something about Tatiana or her family. However, the moment she mentions a diary to the fatherly Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl) his tone immediately changes and she is sucked into a world she knows very little about and wants even less to do with. As her contact with the Mafia continues, Anna meets Semyon’s son Kirill (Vincent Cassel) and his driver Nikolai (Viggo Mortenson), both of whom scare and disgust her. Braving the shadows of fear and doubt, Anna relentlessly searches for answers, putting her own fate in jeopardy in order to preserve the young child’s safety.
Eastern Promises is a beautifully made film, shot in a shadowy darkness and combined with ultra-real action scenes that put aside style and focus on raw energy to deliver absolutely breathtaking scenes. Watts is perfectly cast as the innocent but strong willed Anna, Cassel is excellent as the drunken fool Kirill and Mueller-Stahl is effortlessly menacing as the head of the Mafia family. As good as those three are, Viggo Mortenson steals the show as the even-keeled “driver” who keeps a low profile and knows much more than he lets on. He has a few highly memorable scenes and it is easy to see why he is a favorite tool of Cronenberg’s; they work well together and Mortenson seems to fully become the characters that are created for him. Eastern Promises is bold-faced entertainment with a conscience and it is surely one of the best films of the year.
4.5/5 Stars
FESTWATCH: 48-HOUR PARTY PEOPLE
Source: The Globe and Mail
12 p.m.
The female television camera operator waiting for the press conference for Eastern Promises says she is half-Russian, and while she isn't sure what she thinks about David Cronenberg's new film, she offers one endorsement: "Viggo Mortensen's Russian accent? Impeccable."
For Mortensen, who speaks English, Danish and Spanish fluently, and can handle himself in French, Italian, Swedish and Norwegian, one more language on his resumé is apparently no big deal. "When you're speaking a different language, you feel differently," he says. "It's not just the muscles in your mouth, but your posture and the way you present yourself."
French co-star Vincent Cassels says he and Mortensen "tried to use as much Russian as possible because, to be realistic, when two Russian characters are speaking together, they wouldn't be speaking English, so we kept trying to add more Russian phrases. David Cronenberg was going, 'What are you two saying to each other?' "
"It was like some creeping disease," Cronenberg says. "You wake up one morning and everyone is speaking Russian."
Thanks to various people at Viggo-Works!