Eastern Promises

Saw Eastern Promises (thanks, Basil!) The film follows a nurse who takes care of the infant of a teenage mother who died in delivery. She tries to uncover the teenager's past only to find, ala Blue Velvet, that this leads down a deep and dark rabbit hole. Her only ally seems to be a chauffeur whose true motivations are muddy and mercurial indeed, even in an already shadowy world. The film was directed by Cronenberg but it's a very atypical film for him. The grotesque body horror is kept to a minimum and the strange echoes of noir are kept almost subliminal. At several points we see blood bubble out of necks and there's a finger-snipping scene early on that's fairly toe-curling, but no one, for example, peels off their own skin or anything like that.

One aspect in which this film betrays its Cronenberg-lian origins is in its obsession with the true intentions of the chauffeur. Cronberg is kind of interested in identity and where that identity gets lost, muddled, or perverted. The nurse is drawn into this nether-world but is never exactly touched by it. Her identity remains strong and true. The intentions of every other major character are made fairly plain (even though they are sometimes revealed in oblique ways.) The chauffeur, meanwhile, smilingly and smoothly keeps simultaneous lies alive and implies (but does not, mind you, actually say) much with ambiguous nods and long silences. The ideas of him that other characters have in their heads are projected onto the void that he presents to them. And perhaps, the ending slyly implies, no one is right.

This is also worth mentioning, although it is very small, but the film has a mini-theme of disrespect for the dead causing trouble. Not only do the characters say this to each other often, but the nurse is drawn in to the drama when she takes a diary off of the teenage mother's corpse. Her Russian uncle identifies this as grave-robbing. One character is killed while pissing on a man's grave. In a fight-scene, where thugs attack the chauffeur with linoleum-knives, they do that surprise-not-dead thing (twice!) Like I say, this doesn't fit with my pet-theory about identity and I therefore discard this theme as extraneous.

The film is moody and atmospheric. It plays a sort of mystery or as a subdued gangster flick. It has the usual gangster super-cool but a mystery's sense of disaster kept barely under control. A good movie.