EASTERN PROMISES

I was lucky enough to be in one of those 'select theaters' recently to see the Toronto Film Festival award-winning feature by David Cronenberg, "Eastern Promises." This movie has it all: blood, death, dismemberment ... and Naomi Watts!

Now, you are able to experience it for yourself at theaters nationwide. Imagine a movie combining the unease and foreboding of A History of Violence with the dark societal underbelly of Dirty, Pretty Things -- the director and screenwriter, respectively, of two of my favorite recent movies have teamed up for this one -- and you have a sense of what awaits you: another great time at the movies!

The revelation in this movie is the lead perfomance by Viggo Mortensen: the dude can act! He plays a sympathetic Russian underworld underling, to Naomi Watts' sympathetic British nurse (reviews insist on calling her a 'midwife', which I don't understand at all). This will be my last mention of Ms. Watts, not because she isn't her usual captivating self, but her part doesn't utilize the full range of her immense talent (compared to her lead role in last year's shamefully overlooked The Painted Veil). She does get to ride around London on a cool motorcycle, though, wearing an even cooler designer black leather motorcycle jacket (the name -- Belstaff -- went straight from the closing credits to my Christmas list: another reason to stay and watch the end credits!).

The story might seem familiar: a Russian version of Goodfellas, if you will. But because the milieu is different, and the directing so assured, you don't mind spending another two hours of your life with mobsters. The piece-de-resistance of the movie is a four-minute fight scene in a public steam room. The bathhouse fight is already being hailed as a classic, and rightly so. It will take your breath away, not least because it involves two fully-clothed Chechen assassins with ornate, long knives attempting to kill a completely nude Viggo Mortensen. Completely!

While critics have equated the sequence to the car chase in French Connection (1971), a more apt comparison is the homoerotic nude wrestling match between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed in Ken Russell's Women in Love (1970). Let's face it: full frontal male nudity still has the power to shock a mainstream audience, even those with HBO subscriptions. Regardless of sexual orientation, a viewer's mind is in a whirl: you cannot believe the audacity of the filmmaking while you wonder: "What should I be looking at?" and "How long is the director going to put his actors (and us) through this?" It leaves you unsettled, off-balance, and exhausted in a way that makes all other choreographed fights in action movies, no matter how well-done, look and feel 'staged.' Of course they are staged -- It's a movie, after all -- but the director's goal is to make a viewer forget that, to take him out of his reality and into the film's reality. Proof enough of Cronenberg's success in bringing that reality to his audience are the critic's giddy comparisons to classics from the Seventies.

No one who is serious about making an annual Top Ten Movie list should miss "Eastern Promises."

R.I.P. x 3

Two great directors of world cinema died on the same day last month: Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman. Bergman, without question, leaves behind the richer legacy: witness the many lists of 'must see' Bergman films published after his death (like this one). My only contribution to that dialogue is this: any critic who doesn't include Bergman's 1960 black-and-white masterpiece "The Virgin Spring" -- IS A HACK!

Of course, Bergman had his famous "The Silence of God trilogy" (and I've seen them all: Through a Glass Darkly, The Silence, and my favorite of the three, the bleak Winter Light, with Bergman stalwarts Ingrid Thulin and Max von Sydow). But Antonioni's strict, unwavering formalism in his equally-famous "Alienation trilogy"carries a unique fascination for all you hardcore foreignfilmguy(s) out there. (I know you're out there!)

I recently had the pleasure of seeing the last of the trilogy ("L'Eclisse," following the more famous "L'avventura" and "La Notte" -- all starring the lovely Monica Vitti), and I had a revelation: Monica Vitti is the original 'RPT' (that stands for 'Ron Palmer type' for those who don't know me and my weaknesses, and it is shorthand for what I humbly consider to be the ideal woman).

Why Monica Vitti, and not, say, Greta Garbo, Louise Brooks, Anna Karina, or Hedy Lamarr? All are mysterious, exotic, desirable, pale-skinned brunettes. But Monica had something extra: she was totally out-of-reach, not only for this kid from Pampa, Texas, but for every man who entered her orbit. She personified the untouchable female: her existential angst and ennui formed an impenetrable barrier to any human connection that came to dominate the relationships throughout European cinema in the great decade of the Sixties. She was not only beautiful and bored, she was completely and totally unknowable. She couldn't (or wouldn't?) let anyone in. Watch four of the five films she made with Antonioni, and ask yourself after each one: "What was her f**ing problem, anyway?" She remains, like the films she stars in, an inscrutable puzzle, and THAT is what makes her the quintessential RPT.

The third passing I mourn is that of the German actor Ulrich Muhe, star of the 2006 Oscar-winning "The Lives of Others." Like Italian comic actor Massimo Troisi in "Il Postino," this brave and accomplished actor completed the role of a lifetime while facing a life-threatening illness. Godspeed, Mr. Muhe!