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."

Volver was robbed!

That is my last word on the Best Foreign Film Oscar race of 2006. After having seen all five nominated movies, I can now say that Almodovar's latest is at least the equal of two of the nominees -- the excellent "Pan's Labyrinth" from Mexico, and the eventual winner from Germany, "The Lives of Others" -- and is clearly superior to the other three: Denmark's Efter Brylluppet ("After the Wedding"); Algeria's Indigenes ("Days of Glory"); and 'Canada's' "Water" (which is about as Canadian as the Blue Jays starting lineup!).

I found Indigenes to be the best of the three (I will discuss it in more detail in a later post entitled "Fighting the Good Fight"). Like Water, Efter begins in the subcontinent of India, leaving the audience off-balance momentarily. Not to worry: when the action shifts to Kobnhavn (Copenhagen) the movie slides into familiar Dogma territory: emotionally intense scenes of angst and anger, scripted by the sure hand of Lars von Trier-acolyte Anders Thomas Jensen, whose string of hits begins with 1999's Mifune, and extends to 2004's Brothers and the upcoming Red Road (premiered U.S. in the at the AFI-Dallas Film Fest in 2007). Only this film has a musical soundtrack (thankfully); one of the strange charms of the movie is being introduced to the Donald Trump-like character of listening to "It's Raining Men" on his car radio--then later dancing to it at his birthday party! [Picture a bunch of straight, white Europeans getting down with the gay anthem in the land of the midnight sun!]

There are fine performances all around, especially by the lead actor, (a Danish Viggo Mortensen!) and the actress who plays his daughter. That cannot mask the flaws in the movie's structure and technique, including an unnecessary, too-pat ending. In Volver, you know from the start you are in the hands of a master: so you sit back and let him take you wherever he wants to go.

It speaks volumes to the lameness of the Hollywood Foreign Press that, with the wealth of good foreign films in competition, their lack of imagination led them to nominate two 'American' films: Letters from Iwo Jima and the execrable Apocalypto, in their Foreign Film category.