Susan Granger’s review of “Eastern Promises” (Focus Features)
The naked bathhouse fight is perhaps the most eagerly anticipated scene in director David Cronenberg’s latest thriller – but there’s more to it than that.
Once a prisoner in Siberia, stoic, stone-faced and ruthlessly ambitious Nikoli Luzhin (Viggo Mortensen) works as a driver for twinkly-eyed, mild-mannered Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), the proprietor of an elegant Russian restaurant in London. But behind the scenes – and the perpetually bubbling borscht – Semyon is the shrewd Godfather of the expatriate mob. Known as Vory v Zakone, its members, like Japanese yakuza, have distinguishing tattoos.
When hospital midwife Anna Khitrova (Naomi Watts) retrieves a diary, written in Cyrillic, off a teenage girl from the Ukraine who dies giving birth to a baby girl, she naively asks Semyon to translate it – after her Russian-born uncle (Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski) refuses. The diary details how the girl has been exploited as a sex slave, serving the kingpin and his minions, including his nasty, psychopathic son, Kirill (French actor Vincent Cassel), who obviously feels homosexual urges toward hard-bodied Nikoli.
Mortensen’s highly publicized naked scene takes place in a Turkish steam bath where he’s attacked by two black leather-clad, knife-wielding Chechen thugs. Gratuitous and exploitive, his full-frontal exposure makes him particularly vulnerable during the brutal, four-minute encounter, which is perhaps the longest male nude scene ever in a Hollywood mainstream movie.
Working from Steve Knight’s (“Dirty Pretty Things”) maudlin script, Cronenberg (“A History of Violence”) and cinematographer Peter Suschitzky ratchet the tension by adding shadowy, sinister undertones, amplified by Howard Shore’s melodramatic score. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Eastern Promises” is a grimly gory, ultimately surprising 7. And it certainly makes you stop thinking about Viggo Mortensen as “Lord of the Rings'” King Aragorn of Middle Earth.
