Eastern Promises

Nobody delivers embodied violence quite like Cronenberg. The blade digging back and forth into that poor bastard's throat, the arterial spray which shocks the young man holding the razor. Even before that, when the young man is trying to avoid this responsibility, there's a tremendous physical quality to his anxiety, a tension it's hard to miss. And yet, our victim misses it--I guess you would never really suspect that it's you who's about to die. (With the trauma to the throat, this sort of reminds me of the attempted assassination in Cronenberg and Viggo's prior collaboration, which I just watched, wherein the protagonist of that film is very nearly taken off guard and killed.) One of the most homoerotic crime films ever put together, one of the major vehicles of drama in this film being the relation between Nikolai and Kirill. It's the sort of thing that would have been subtly flagged in a film made in the time of the Hays Code, but here is approached confrontationally, dragging us strenuously through the many consequences of Kirill's overwhelming insecurity, but also his love for Nikolai conflicting with the aggressiveness he thinks he needs to show, his father's hatred of queers, the ambiguity of Nikolai's own sexuality. It would have been really easy to just let Kirill be reprehensible, incompetent, stupid. Instead, Cronenberg and Kirill's actor, Vincent Cassell, constantly work to humanize this man, who is no doubt a victim of circumstance in that he is the product of violence, hatred, and the unimaginable lifestyle of his father. He knows kindness and love of the sort his father is, I think, incapable of understanding. He feels guilt and fear, and he begs forgiveness of his baby sister. And he doesn't let himself connect with Nikolai for too long, whether out of fear or insecurity or because he's afraid to feel joy. But it's clear that he loves Nikolai with more intensity than he could ever admit. Oh yeah, Naomi Watts is in this film, in yet another "Why isn't she the most famous woman alive?" performance. Naomi Watts is a sort of litmus test, in my opinion. If you don't like her, maybe your opinions are just bad. Another heartbreaking final shot of Viggo. This film is an incredible companion piece to A History of Violence, but it's certainly not just that. This film is so much more sensitive than the prior, and on the surface level has a more hopeful outcome. But there are depths of human misery and cruelty on display here unmatched in A History of Violence, and in the end, we see Nikolai dwelling on the diary he read, knowing that despite everything he's been through, girls like Tatiana will continue to be tricked into these situations. "No, you're going to fuck, старик." "Calm down, Kirill." "I am recommending you to my father, I have to be sure that you ain't no fucking queer."