It's interesting that David Cronenberg and David Lynch both released films in 2007 featuring eastern Europeans shadily huddled in alleyways. These movies also shared a similar theme: the fetishization of violence and the abhorrent results of realizing its appeal.
Eastern Promises is really just A History of Violence, but having roped in a more mainstream audience with his previous (and much more mainstream) film he allows himself a little more of the "bodyhorror" that characterized his earlier work. Cronenberg, for you nonfans, approached horror from a modern cautionary perspective, in Videodrome and Crash and The Fly and Naked Lunch and Dead Ringers(his best film) he shows us what happens when "technology" and "the body" overlap due to one of three things:
1- man's hubris (The Fly);
2- unstoppable perversion (Crash, Dead Ringers)
3-insanity (Naked Lunch)
With A History of Violence he allows his thematic approach to mature. It isn't modern technology as such that threatens "normal" humanness, if such a thing exists, rather it is the absolute failure of anonymity--the impossibility of anonymity--in the modern world that makes us constantly at risk. Viggo's character cannot re-start life after leaving his gangster ways because his gangster life weighs down on him -- he is "found out" but mostly because he could never really hide.
Similarly, Eastern Promises offers us an extension of this failure of anonymity. A Russian girl gives birth and dies wordlessly, but, alas, she has left a revealing diary that threatens the existence of underground yakuza-style Russian gangsters living in London. This damning book draws Naomi Watts and Viggos' characters further into this dark world, but also draws them together. Not only are the identity of prominent Russian gangsters threatened, but most importantly at stake is that of THE (tiny) BABY born in the film's early scenes. Her existence provides genetic proof of the villain having raped her, and is used to close the case in a sense.
I like this movie because we are reintroduced to what Cronenberg started in his last film, an exgesis on why we can never restart out lives/have two identities/go on lying forever. Not in this world. Not in a world where dying women leave diaries. Not in a world where babies surface to genetically prove our crimes. Not in a world where perverse curiosity (Naomi Watts is drawn further and further into this world because she "cares about the fate" of the baby, but her fetishistic maternal instinct are understood, in the film, as at least enmeshed in her sexual desire for Viggo).
I was interested most of all to see what Cronenberg would do with his new mainstream attention. What he would force THE EYE OF AMERICA (hyperbole maybe, but H. of V. was a big, big film) to gaze perseverently upon?
Answer: A dick. Viggo Mortenson's dick. An extended, naked, shower fight sequence. Well choreographed, I might add. Not what I want to see-- but sort of brilliant, Mr. Cronenberg.
I like mainstream-Cronenberg, even if he no longer can serve up perfect horror premises like he did in Dead Ringers (identical twin gynaecologists who work on mutant vaginas). But La-Di-Da, la-di-da.
1 comment:
I think there is a strong theme reflecting redemption in these last two films. In History of Violence, the attempt to escape if futile as you say, but is resolved by the cathartic final scene where the former gangster, torturer plays the part of white knight by protecting his family and himself from the evils he once ascribed to.
In Eastern Promises, the gangster redeems his actions to assume control through a general moral decency despite his actions. I think this is something that goes beyond his police relationship to an attempt to humanize himself despite the inhuman actions he has grown to accept in himself.
Is this perhaps a trend towards optimism for Cronenberg, a man obsessed with the principles of degradation and destruction? Is he a changed director. Perhaps!
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