David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises is a straighter version of Inland Empire, which isn’t to say that it isn’t totally queer. The film is the story of a woman in trouble: Anna Khitrova (Naomi Watts), a London midwife who becomes obsessed with finding the family of a 14-year-old sex worker who dies after delivering a child under her watch. The anonymous dead girl’s diary, written in Russian, provides the film with its heavy-handed narration and brings Anna in contact with Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), an old-school don who commandeers the Vory V Zakone criminal faction out of his Trans-Siberian restaurant, his son Kirill (Vincent Cassel), and their mysterious driver Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen).
The story is clear-cut, which is something of a bummer after the heady, one-two punch of Spider and A History of Violence, both triumphs of layering and density, but Cronenberg’s exquisite framing provides the film with arresting psychological dimensions. Only Roman Polanski can better frame the world along diagonal lines, but Cronenberg’s images are more insinuating, leaving one feeling wary of what may be bubbling beneath the surface of things.
Way before Semyon learns that Kirill is being ridiculed by his enemies for possibly being gay, Cronenberg has already amped up the homoerotic tension: in Kirill insisting on watching Nikolai have sex with a prostitute from behind, as well as in Nikolai’s balls-out escape from the grip of two goons inside a Turkish bath. The film’s Russians are not conceived beyond vodka-guzzling stereotypes, and Steven Knight’s screenplay, much in the spirit of the atrocious Dirty Pretty Things, essentially transforms the nightmare of thwarted immigrant dreams into a tawdry sex expo, but Cronenberg’s contemplation of codes of masculine honor by anxiously putting the male body on the line is deliciously transgressive.
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