Out of Frame: Eastern Promises

Another less obvious companion piece to the film is Dirty Pretty Things. Both films were penned by Steve Knight, and both are peripherally about how different groups of immigrants fit into the fabric of modern-day London. In the previous film, it was the immigrants who make up the service industry: cab drivers, maids, and laborers. The immigrants at the center of Eastern Promises may have largely made more comfortable lives for themselves, but always on the backs, and on the skin trade, of other immigrants like themselves. Knight's screenplays for both films are edgy thrillers, but deal in heavy questions about the complexities of culture clashes in a world that is constantly growing smaller. And how it is often the case that the promises of a new and better life (one of the "promises" implied by the title) are never delivered as simply as they are in dreams.

Most remarkable is the depth provided by Knight's script. Eastern Promises could easily have been epic in scope. Each character comes with richly suggested backstories and subtexts that could have been fleshed out into a gangster epic worthy of Coppola, Scorcese, or Leone. But by just hinting at the turmoil going far into everyone's pasts, Knight creates a lean, taut, masterpiece of a screenplay. Kirill, the "prince" of the mafia family, son of the patriarch, is particularly noteworthy. He's played with sleazy magnificence by Vincent Cassell, but in a role that could have been an easy stock character, the ruthless but inept heir to the throne, a world of complexity is conveyed with startling brevity. Our initial impressions of him are challenged gradually with questions about Kirill's motivations, psyche and sexuality. So it is with Anna, who's grief over a lost child of her own gives her a special connection to the dead teen's baby, and with her uncle, whose past may not have included the KGB connection he claims, but seems to have been colorful nonetheless. Then there's Mortensen, whose character is never clear, and a shifting mystery of accumulated sadnesses right up to the final shot of the film. Even Tatiana, the teen mother whose death sets the complex web of the plot in motion at the start, maintains a constant presence and development of her character throughout the film, as excerpts from her tragic diary serve as narrated signposts throughout the film.

Through it all, Cronenberg maintains the detached mastery that has become his trademark. He lingers to the point of discomfort on the bluish, bloody, and barely breathing body of a newborn near the beginning, making it both a medical curiosity and the emotional engine that drives Anna throughout the film. Later, in a fight sequence in a bath house, he films, without music and without tricky editing, a nude and utterly vulnerable Mortensen fighting for his life in a knife battle that is breathtaking in its brutality. Viggo's naughty bits (which are on constant display) are going to get all the press, but the real reason this should be one of the most talked about scenes in any film so far this year is how expertly Cronenberg depicts the emotionless and savage fight for survival. And even when the conflict is less bloody, less overt, it maintains a constant presence, a cold steel tension that makes Eastern Promises easily one of the best films of the year. Everyone in the movie is fighting for something, and Cronenberg and Knight make a strong point about how conflict can rule our lives. But that winning doesn't always lead to much of a victory at all.

Eastern Promises is now playing at the Regal Gallery Place Stadium 14, and is scheduled to expand to more theaters across the area on Friday.