A pregnant 14-year-old Russian girl is brought into a London hospital where she dies of childbirth. Someone had been trafficking her. One of the nurses, Anna, finds the girls diary and she believes it’ll give her clues to who did this to the girl. A lot of the stuff in the diary leads to Siberian Restaurant owned by Semyon, who is in the Russian mafia. Anna is also trying to find a home for the baby girl. Nikolai is in charge of cleaning up messes by removing evidence that could lead to the mafia. Nikolai gets close to Anna and tries to help her in some ways.
Blaine: BBC Studios wanted to make a film involving Eastern European prostitutes in London. Prostitution is the oldest job in the world. Girls are drugged and rarely seen because they are kept behind closed doors. They are basically slaves. Trafficking heroin could get you a 40 year sentence. Trafficking 100 people could get six months to a year. It’s not considered to be a big crime because they can always allege that it was all done voluntarity and also the girls will refuse to give any evidence, so it is much more lucrative and less dangerous to traffic people than it is to traffic heroin. The trafficking is something that happens in London, Paris and Moscow. Screenwriter Steven Knight had an idea about having an English woman being led into the world of the Russian mafia. Steven met a guy, who’s name will remain nameless because it’s too dangerous, and he was charming, elegant, well-read, but also a trafficker. So David wrote the Semyon character and based him on that guy. Semyon is the main suspect to the young pregnant girl’s death. Anna doesn’t fully know that Semyon is responsible for the girl’s death, but she does know she wants whoever did it to be behind bars and she is putting her life in danger by investigating. Anna snoops around dangerous people who act nice.
What attracted director David Cronenberg to “Eastern Promises” was that it shows two different cultures, Russian and England, mixed together in one movie. David Cronenberg developed a great relationship with Viggo Mortensen on “A History of Violence” and it has made David want Viggo to be in every movie he makes. Viggo Mortensen loves making movies because he gets to learn things he never knew before. For “Eastern Promises”, Viggo was able to get a lot of useful information to prepare himself for the role of Nikolai. Viggo found a book about Russian prisons and learned that if you don’t have tattoos on your skin you don’t exist because your whole life story is written on your body. Like your criminal history and everything about you. If your inmates see that you don’t have any tattoos then they don’t trust you because they can’t see what type of person you are. Viggo sent the book to David Cronenberg, so that he could look through it himself and it altered their perception of what “Eastern Promises” was. There was a reference to tattooing in the first draft Steven Knight wrote, but it wasn’t a major metaphorical pivot point of the film until Viggo showed the book. David and Steven learned about an organization called the for v zakono, which is the Russian mafia. They express their rank and their history through tattoos. So David and Steven wrote a new scene where Nikolai is wearing nothing but boxers in front of Russians.
Viggo went to Russia to absorbed people. He spent a lot of time with disreputable Russian people which helped him explore the Nikolai character. Viggo also met people who had the same personality as Nikolai and he based his performance on them. David loved everything about Viggo’s performance, the way he walked, talked, moved. Nikolai is actually a Federal Security Service agent, but you don’t find that out until close to the end of the film. It is hard to believe Nikolai is an agent because he is so convincing as a gangster, but it explains why he is helping Anna. Naomi Watts was first in mind to play Anna and she said yes to the project because of David. David is a director who knows what he is doing and Naomi felt she was in good hands. There are emotional, linguistic and sociological subtleties involved with Anna and Naomi had to be conniving of that. There are Russian actors who could have been hired for this project, but their English wasn’t good. So David hired actors who’s nationalities were French, European and German, but were able to speak English and pull off a great Russian accent. Viggo Mortensen is Danish, Vincent Cassel is French and they had to learn how to speak Russian. Anna's Russian uncle Stepan is played Jerzy Skolimowski, a Polish filmmaker, and he speaks Russian, but he speaks it with a Polish accent. Not one actor in “Eastern Promises” was Russian. German actor Armin Mueller Stahl loves mafia movies like “The Godfather” and the performances of Marlon Brando and Al Pacino in those movies. To bring his own mafia boss character to life was a challenge for Armin.
People have complimented on the scene where Nikolai fights two men trying to kill him in the bathhouse. Nikolai has to fight and defend himself against the men trying to kill him and he does that without wearing any clothes. He is completely nude and you see his johnson a lot. Nikolai is injured, but he manages to kill both assassins. David wanted to see a lot out of that scene and Viggo could have had a towel wrapped around him while fighting, but David thought that looked silly, so he decided that Viggo would be nude. David and the production designer found a bathhouse in London and they loved the look of it, but there needed to be more space so that the fight could move to a different spot. Like Nikolai and the assassins are going all over the place while fighting. So they built a bathhouse in a sound studio that was like the one they saw, but made it wider. “Eastern Promises” couldn’t have a romantic relationship between Nikolai and Anna, even though they have worked well together through the film, still they are both completely different from each other and they can never be together. Plus Nikolai is about to take over Semyon’s position, probably as part of his job of being an agent. There’s still mob bosses out there and I guess he needs to find ways of bringing them down. That’s my guess. Semyon gives an order to have the baby of the prositute killed because it is evidence that could put him away. Nikolai and Anna manage to stop it before the baby is harmed. Anna has a new task and that is to look over the baby. She takes her in and raises her as her own.
My rating on “Eastern Promises” is five out of five stars
