Sept. 8, 6:30pm at Roy Thomson Hall & Sept. 9, 9:30am at the Ryerson Theatre. Opens in theatres Sept. 14.
Just don't give the plot away,” chides David Cronenberg while discussing his new film Eastern Promises, which premieres next weekend at the Toronto International Film Festival before opening wide in theatres on Sept. 14.
His request is understandable. When Cronenberg came to TIFF in 2005 with A History of Violence, the film had already showed at Cannes, its contents carefully picked over by an international coterie of critics. That A History of Violence was acclaimed by many as the best film in competition surely tempered the lack of spoiler-free coverage. But Eastern Promises touches down in the director's hometown as an unknown commodity, preceded only by a moody trailer and Cronenberg's needs-no-introduction reputation.
So while it's liberating to conduct an interview unencumbered by buzz or received critical notions, the fact remains that Eastern Promises – which concerns a London midwife, Anna (Naomi Watts), whose investigation into the case of a teenage girl who died during labour runs her afoul of some Russian mobsters – is Cronenberg's most densely plotted movie in some time. A History of Violence was twisty, but its narrative plumbing was left shrewdly exposed. There are superficial similarities between that film and Eastern Promises – they're both crime sagas of a sort, and both feature a guardedly sinister Viggo Mortensen. The new film is, on the surface, simpler than its predecessor because it doesn't work to interrogate its thriller conventions. It's also tricky, however, in that its straightforward progression obscures Cronenberg's detours into jagged auteur territory.
“I wouldn't normally have thought about doing two gangster movies in a row,” says the director, though he won't quite admit that he's made a gangster movie again. “It's interesting to note that there really isn't much gangster stuff in there. I was watching Miami Vice the other night and I realized I'm not interested in the mechanics of the mob... how they get the drugs, how they launder the money, how things are shipped. I'm not a fan of heist movies, where the mechanics of the heist are lovingly detailed. But criminality and people who live in a state of perpetual transgression – that is interesting to me.”
With the exception of Watts' uncorrupted heroine, Eastern Promises is populated exclusively by professional transgressors. If the American mobsters in A History of Violence were all hat, their Russian counterpoints comprise a genuinely fearsome lot. As a dirty restaurateur who learns that Anna has come into possession of a potentially scandalous text, Armin Mueller-Stahl evinces avuncular menace à la Paul Sorvino in Goodfellas; Vincent Cassel is a feral, uncomfortable presence (even more so than usual) as his excitable boychik son. Most imposing of all is Cronenberg's new muse Mortensen as Nikolai, the gang's heavily tattooed and taciturn driver. The uncertainty of Nikolai's motives towards the snooping Anna – as well as his employers – supplies Eastern Promises with much of its tension. And Mortensen is a glowering marvel, locating a great range of expression in impassivity, his stone face prone to compelling split-second fissures.
“When I was shooting A History of Violence, I thought Viggo looked very Slavic, even though he's Danish-American,” recalls Cronenberg. “I think it was his cheekbones and his chin. When I read the script, I knew he would be Nikolai.”
He also knew that the script, by Oscar nominee Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things) would have to change, just as it did on A History of Violence. “There was extensive rewriting,” he explains. “Steve was a wonderful collaborator. He knew that his script, which had languished at the BBC, was unfinished and unresolved. It went off in many different directions at once. It needed to be reined in and trimmed.”
Certainly, the script's portrait of a panicked London made up of slippery side streets and ethnic enclaves is reminiscent of Dirty Pretty Things. “You don't find those locations in Notting Hill,” says Cronenberg, “and that's very much a Steven Knight thing. I felt very comfortable and at home in that. I'm always interested in enclosed little hothouse cultures that seem to thrive in the context of a bigger culture.”
And then there are some emphases, such as the fetishistic attention lavished on the mobsters' old world tradition of tattooing, that scan as completely Cronenbergian.
“The tattoo thing came afterwards, from research we did,” he says. “There was a documentary by Alix Lambert called The Mark of Cain, about Russian prisons and tattooing. The question of identity being on the body does connect with other scenes that have preoccupied me.”
Yet in what is becoming an every-other-year ritual, the director won't cop to any intentional correspondences with previous work. He's made reference in the past to the perceived “imaginary checklist” that he does not use when selecting projects, and he takes little pleasure from efforts – his own, or anyone else's – to tease out resonances across his movies. “It's intuition,” he says. “You don't know where it will lead you, and if it's good, it won't lead you into a dead end.”
His intuition was pretty good on the tattoo stuff. While some aspects of Eastern Promises feel laboured – Anna's arc falls flat, and there's an intermittent voice-over that might have been junked – watching Mortensen's Nikolai literally earn his stripes as he climbs (or maybe descends) the underworld ladder has the stomach-knotting appeal of Cronenberg's best work. There is one scene – the in-depth discussion of which prompted the director's anti-spoiler request referenced at the top of this story – that should rank not only in his personal pantheon of spectacularly deployed gore but among the most exhilaratingly visceral patches of cinema, period, full stop.
And if “exhilaratingly visceral” sounds like a contradiction, it's one Cronenberg is happy to parse.
“That's the thing about violence onscreen,” he says. “It can be cathartic and scary at the same time. That's the dual nature of it, and why it's such a conundrum, why it will never not be a part of human life. People will feel this is a very violent film, yet there are only three scenes of violence, compared to The Departed where the body count is much higher.”
Cronenberg's assertion that violence will “never not be a part of human life” prompts a question: will it never not be a part of his moviemaking?
Thirty years after Shivers and Rabid invented the idea of the modern body-horror film and sent certain Canadian cultural guardians into a frothing rage worthy of one of the latter movie's insatiable sex zombies, the common denominator across his filmography remains the same. It's the brutal, essential malleability of the human vessel – the “deep, penetrating dive into the plasma pool” described by Jeff Goldblum's self-destructive scientist in The Fly.
“Well, I'll never rule out doing Gandhi,” says Cronenberg, a tad more deadpan than usual. “I am very interested in doing things I haven't done before, that feel like some part of me but are different. A History of Violence and Eastern Promises are that, and it has been unexpected and fulfilling. So what you said before, I wouldn't rule it out.”