Bodies of Evidence

The characters in David Cronenberg's latest tell stories with their flesh.

by Shaun Brady

Recommended

"In Russian prisons, your life story is written on your body," explains a London detective examining a tattooed corpse. Throughout David Cronenberg's career, the Canadian director has told stories through altered bodies. His latest seems, on the surface, to follow the most straightforward storyline of any of his works since the 1979 car-racing lark Fast Company. But its plot follows the interactions of human flesh just as much as the mutations of The Brood or the self-mutilations of Crash; only here, flesh tells tales through violence and desecration, the narrative ornamentation of those tattoos, or the birth of a baby.

Eastern Promises opens with two instances of spilt blood that set events in motion. First, a brutal murder in a barber shop, where the unsure assassin has to saw ineptly through flesh to get the job done; and a young girl about to give birth, hemorrhaging in a drug store. Nurse Naomi Watts inspects the girl's purse, its scarlet color blending with her blood-stained clothes and suggesting that her life has drained into the bag. In essence it has, as the diary contained is the only record, besides her baby, left after she dies during childbirth.

The girl, a child prostitute, forces Watts to cross paths with Armin Mueller-Stahl, the head of a Russian mob family in London; his dissolute, Fredo-like son (Vincent Cassel); and Cassel's driver, Viggo Mortensen. The baby's DNA threatens the family with exposure; Mortensen's removal of fingers and teeth from the aforementioned corpse renders the body a story without an identity.

Mortensen's own physicality is a constant presence, from his icy demeanor to the ritualistic presentation of new tats as he ascends the mob ladder. But the central set piece is a fight sequence in a bathhouse, where the actor, completely naked, takes on two leather-jacketed thugs armed with linoleum knives. Each act of violence resonates, as further chapters in Mortensen's story get etched onto his torso.

Unlike similar mob films, the twists and crosses are downplayed — as usual, Cronenberg has reshaped the script, by Dirty Pretty Things writer Steven Knight, to reflect his own obsessions. Following the story, which unfolds in rather predictable ways, is far less revealing than following the ways in which people, or more accurately bodies, are used and traded. More important are the character relationships, specifically that between Mortensen and Cassel, which brings the homoeroticism of these all-male societies into the forefront. Cassel's constant drinking and ineffectuality in the family stems from his sexuality, an aspect that Mortensen manages to twist to his advantage, though the two end on a genuinely tender note.

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Eastern Promises

Directed by David Cronenberg

A Focus Features release