Eastern Promises 4K 2007 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

On Christmas Eve, a young Russian woman, very young, almost a teenager, dies in childbirth in London. In the arms of Anna, the midwife, is left with an infant and a diary, which she found in the girl's belongings. Anna is horrified by her life story and begins her own investigation, which leads directly to the lair of the Russian mafia.

So she meets Nikolai, who helps her make sense of this tangled story. Anna and did not realize that her new acquaintance - a cruel and mysterious hitman who belongs to one of the Russian gangs in London, and the facts described in the diary, compromise his boss. Another terrifying chain of love and murder, deception and retribution is set in motion...

Review 4K Movie

Cronenberg is one of the toughest directors in the history of cinema, every film of which is pain, incest, hatred, murderous intrigues, it is a visual range, which disgusts people with loose nerves, this is what distinguishes his films from the works of other directors, and some have the courage even to copy his style, but nobody can make something more disgusting, yet with sense and intelligence, and hardly anyone will ever manage to do so...

Knight, Stephen Knight - a man interested in the back side of London, its narrow alleys and dark corners, where the passage is available only through corruption. So he wrote the screenplay for the film Dirty Pretty Things, which turns the inside out of the British capital, its rotten foundations and morals sent far and wide. But one film didn't seem enough for him. That's how the idea for 'Vice for Export' came about. He needed to tell about other cultures, other customs, other people.

Cronenberg brought together two incompatible worlds: the world of ordinary people and another world, an underground world where laws are ruled, where everything is decided 'amicably' by force, authority and a gun behind his back, where there are no police and the apparatus of government is badly undermined. Coincidentally, this collision occurred through an ordinary midwife, Anna Ivanovna Watts, and a 14-year-old girl who died in childbirth and left a legacy: a child and a diary, describing all the terrible fears, some imaginable. The convergence has begun and there is no stopping it, the merging of worlds will lead to irreparable consequences and a pile of unjustified deaths, incoherent, coming one after another. This would have happened if not for Nicholas, whom David practically forced to make a moral choice.

But not so fast, it's also necessary to mention an important detail of the film - the 'Russian side'...

Stalking the two worlds can not do without comparing their everyday, everyday life. Anna's world is the typical life of a middle-class woman, which Cronenberg wanted to contrast with the luxurious and idle life of Nicholas. And it truly succeeded. The design of the restaurant, which is an important part of the film, is recreated very believably. In the banquet scene of Russian Mafia recreated authentic cuisine of the upper echelons: sandwiches with caviar, sturgeon and national hot drinks - everything as expected.

A lot of work had been done to study Russian culture, nobody bothered to make anything improper, all for the sake of bringing what we saw on the screen closer to real life. To do this, even decided to show in the film images of real people - the hero Armin Muller Stahl - Semen - written off with the owner of a Russian restaurant in New York, and Anna - a copy of the midwife who delivered the eldest son of Steven Knight screenwriter.

A distinctive detail is the speech of the characters. The actors were quite good at pronouncing Russian, with a distinctly Russian accent, not worse than the emigrants who left the expanse of Russian soil about 20 years ago and have already completely forgotten their mother tongue.

The last culminating detail, which connects the whole movie and gives it meaning, is left for later. Now I will return to the planned way.

The brutal, violent world of the Mafia appears on screen, in all its glory, without compromise or censorship. Learned from experience, Knight masterfully depicts the characters of the 'family', whether it be Cyril, son of the head of the family, played by Vincent Cassel, who is used to get everything he wants, but at the same time, anxious to grow in the eyes of his father, secretly organizing dirty deals without his knowledge. Or Semyon, a restaurant owner with a split personality. Like Billy Costigan in The Departed - with his mother wearing one mask, and when he staggered around the city at night with his father - quite another. Semyon looks like a fairly average-looking older man who managed to run his own business, but has a weighty baggage of skeletons behind him, which can't all fit into the same cupboard.

And, most importantly, Nicholas, a hitman and carrier, a man who does not simply give up words, who knows his job and carry it out with filigree precision, typical of executioners to order. This character reminded me a lot of Ian Bridges, the main character in the book The Killer Diary by the Englishman Danny King. They even have similar methods for getting rid of a corpse.

The ideal recipe is as follows: cut off all the fingers and pull out the teeth, so that the body could not be identified by fingerprints or a cast of teeth, then dump it into the abyss of the waters of Thames. It works without fail...

In fact, it is this man, a cold-blooded killer, who is at the center of Cronenberg's invisible canvas, trying to uncover the mysteries of human nature, what drives people to live this or that life and what drives them to fundamentally change their ways, to break the stereotypes built, like waking from sleep at the same time and going to work every day, and to start all over again. What drives us?



This is the main problem with the picture. Here Crony cleverly puts up a visual barrier to cover the truth. That visual barrier is Nikolai's tattoos. According to the Honor Code of Asocial Elements, tattoos are the 'private matter' of their owner, which allow a person versed in their designation to easily read the past of whoever stands before him. Nikolai Luzhin has reached a high position among 'his own', the stars on his lap tell it, they mean he will never kneel.

In total, Mortensen's body was covered with almost 50 tattoos, with each of them bearing a different meaning, the tattoos are a world of hidden symbols, which is difficult enough to study 'from' and 'to'. For this purpose we used various books, telling about the language of the inscriptions and the documentary film Killer's Mark, filmed in Russian prisons.

So what is the meaning of these tattoos? Russian mafiosi are sure that everything written on the body of a 'thief in law' is the truth, they are not interested in the human soul, as if there is no soul, there are only images on the body and they do not care about any underlying details. And in vain... Nikolai Luzhin turned out to be molded from another dough. He - a two-layer crust. The top layer is his body markings, and the bottom layer is his true essence, clearly showing that, although he is a killer, he has a soul, he can show compassion for others, he can save souls who have strayed from the path, that morality is not quite an empty word for him. He proves this three times throughout the film. And the body art on his body says otherwise, doesn't it? One of the captions reads, 'I am a slave to fate, but I will never be a slave to the law.' It's written, so it is, think mobster - the answer will turn out to be wrong.

And the last symbolic side of the signs. Remember the slogan of the movie - 'Every sin leaves a mark'. You have already guessed that it's not about the moral aspect of the question, they say, it leaves a trace in the soul, but on the body, in the form of a tattoo.

So don't sin to leave a trace, and if you have strayed from the way - try to become a member of society again. Save yourself, otherwise no one will save you.