...And this is where we learn that these Russians in London are not only
gangsters but also members of a secret society complete with tattoos,
oaths and Masonic rituals that make you wonder if you have wandered into
The Da Vinci Code by mistake. Kirill is pursued by another set of
Russians because of the initial execution, and Semyon, ever resourceful
and ever devoted to his wayward son, decides to set up Nikolai the
driver in Kirill's place. The scene takes place in a public baths. You
get the idea: two men in black with short sharp knives and an intended
victim with no clothes on: lots of blood and grunting; two deaths, one
gouged eye; one unlikely survivor. It can't be that Cronenberg has lost
control here, since the scene is beautifully choreographed. But what
does he want? Does he want us to laugh, as most people were doing in the
cinema where I saw the film? Does he want nervous laughter perhaps? He
wasn't getting that. ....

LRB 15 November 2007


At the Movies

Michael Wood
Eastern Promises directed by David Cronenberg (2007)

Horror movies are often about materialisation in a very particular
sense, the grisly acting out of fears and phobias that in daily life are
kept safely (if painfully and disastrously) in the mind. No director
realises this more clearly than David Cronenberg. He is best known no
doubt for The Fly (1986), Dead Ringers (1988) and his much vilified
Crash (1996), but some of us have a soft spot, if that's the term, for
his early work The Brood (1979), a classic instance of the acting-out
theory. A psychiatrist prescribes rage therapy to his patients: they are
to let their anger loose and thereby find a cure for what ails them. As
they get into the therapy, freely thinking of how much they hate
someone, for example, a small gang of dwarves with mallets marches off
and beats that someone to death. This is not a metaphor.

I thought of this film as I was watching Cronenberg's newly released
Eastern Promises, and at first I couldn't work out why. This is not a
horror movie but a slick and atmospheric thriller, a sort of cross
between Goodfellas and The Godfather only set in London and with
Russians as the gangsters. But then I realised that this movie too, or
at least what's best in this movie before it succumbs to sheer gore and
then to terminal resolution anxiety, producing happiness and relief when
it should have quit while the going was bad, is all about a violence and
horror that come from somewhere else, invading the ordinary world from a
zone as strange as the individual angry mind. Not Russia, I think, and
not even 'Russia', but some place in our imagination where the secret
kindnesses, family values and occasional lovable gestures of the
American mob are all banished, and only a mixture of power and pathology
remain.

You need a good, maybe even a great villain for this story, and the
movie is lucky in having Armin Mueller-Stahl as Semyon, the head of the
Russian gang. He not only gives us the jovial, twinkling Santa Claus
type the script calls for, he makes us think the script must be wrong
when it invites us to suspect him, as it almost immediately does. And
then when he gets nasty he is so calm and lethal that we can't even
remember the Santa Claus we were so taken by. He is frightening not
because he hides his ruthlessness behind a convincing niceness but
because he is nice - until he needs to be ruthless. It's true that he
doesn't speak English like a Russian, he speaks the excellent English of
the German that he is. But then verisimilitude is not the thing here,
and Cronenberg generally avails himself of the fine old convention by
which foreigners in films speak brief phrases in their own language and
rattle on in English with an accent for the rest of the time. It's true
that Vincent Cassel, as Kirill, Semyon's psychopath son, and Viggo
Mortensen, as Nikolai, Cassel's 'driver', i.e. the man who gets rid of
the bodies, sound a little more Russian, but it's still a game and all
about effect rather than mimesis. The bits of the Russian language and
the glum, liquid accents are signs of foreignness, as Roland Barthes
once said the fringes in Mankiewicz's Julius Caesar were signs of
Romanness. Well, they are signs of more than foreignness. They are signs
of impenetrable darkness, of minds beyond our reach: Mueller-Stahl
because we don't know what he wants, Cassel because he is mad and
Mortensen because he can't be (and isn't, it turns out) as bleak-souled
and merciless as he seems.

The movie opens with two apparently unrelated events: the execution of a
Russian in a London barber's shop and the death in childbirth at a
London hospital of a 14-year-old Ukrainian girl. The execution,
performed by the barber's idiot nephew, has been ordered by Kirill; the
dead girl is part of the traffic that is a small fraction of Semyon's
business. She has also been raped by Kirill and Semyon. However, her
baby survives and there are clues to her past: a notebook and a business
card for a Russian restaurant in Smithfield: Semyon's place. Naomi Watts
is Anna, the midwife who wants to find the child's family. Anna can't
read Russian and so needs to have the notebook translated. Her
heavy-drinking Russian uncle, played by the Polish film director Jerzy
Skolimowski, refuses to touch it until too late; and Semyon, when
consulted, is only too eager to help. This is how violence and horror
enter Anna's ordinary life: full of charm and weighed by threat.

And this is where we learn that these Russians in London are not only
gangsters but also members of a secret society complete with tattoos,
oaths and Masonic rituals that make you wonder if you have wandered into
The Da Vinci Code by mistake. Kirill is pursued by another set of
Russians because of the initial execution, and Semyon, ever resourceful
and ever devoted to his wayward son, decides to set up Nikolai the
driver in Kirill's place. The scene takes place in a public baths. You
get the idea: two men in black with short sharp knives and an intended
victim with no clothes on: lots of blood and grunting; two deaths, one
gouged eye; one unlikely survivor. It can't be that Cronenberg has lost
control here, since the scene is beautifully choreographed. But what
does he want? Does he want us to laugh, as most people were doing in the
cinema where I saw the film? Does he want nervous laughter perhaps? He
wasn't getting that. It may be that the interesting moment in such
stories is always when the dwarves appear with the mallets, not when
they get down to work. And here, in Eastern Promises, a remarkably
gripping and disturbing film loses us (loses me anyway) at precisely the
moment the set-up in the public baths becomes clear. Once the fight
starts the invasion of the ordinary is over; the ordinary has been
replaced by movie gothic. But then that too must be part of Cronenberg's
plan. He likes the mallets.

Similar elements were more successfully combined in Cronenberg's
previous film A History of Violence (2005), in part because the logic of
the plot is itself eerie and in part because the idea of the ordinary is
already overdetermined. How could a film that starts in an
innocent-looking motel not be headed for horror? For that matter, how
could a film set in a small American town full of nice people not be
primed for invasion by something, if not body-snatchers from another
planet then vengeful spirits from the Indian graveyard thoughtlessly
buried beneath a suburb? Or the mob. In A History of Violence it's the
Philadelphia mob, drawn to quiet Indiana by the fact that Tom Stall,
owner of a diner, has made the national news by heroically taking out
two hoods trying to rob his store and rape his staff. Where did he
acquire the skills and speed and courage? Is he perhaps not Tom Stall at
all but someone else, a man with a history of violence? Joey Cusack, for
instance, who once applied barbed wire to a gangster's eye? The film
soon shows, and Tom, played by Viggo Mortensen with a stoic persistence
very similar to the doggedness required by his role in Eastern Promises,
has to do a fair amount of fast and vigorous killing before he can get
back to the diner and his quiet routine with the wife and kids. The
dialogue itself runs constantly to a kind of cryptic surprise, as if
everyone, even the criminals, let alone the peace-loving locals, thought
just getting on with things was easy and to be expected. Even outside of
the movies this is true only if you are extremely lucky or extremely
apathetic and inside a movie it's like praying for the plot to go away.
'Jesus, Joey,' William Hurt says as the Philadelphia boss about to be
shot through the head by his brother. The body falls and the brother
says: 'Jesus, Richie.' This film works so well because the ordinary
world is not innocent, only marginal or small-time in its violence; only
waiting to be invaded by the rabid dwarves of history itself. And
because the ordinary then gets redefined: as a possible achievement,
something to come home to if you can make it home.

Michael Wood teaches at Princeton. His most recent book is Literature
and the Taste of Knowledge.