The latest film from David Cronenberg, and the winner of the Audience
Prize for Best Film at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival,
is not only an impeccably constructed thriller, but also a superb
drama about the preservation of innocence in a fallen world with
somber reflection, the lurking gray peril of an urban underbelly,
shifting shifty glances and unspoken threats. The film isn't merely
filled with crime; it's filled with victims.


Anna Khitrova (Naomi Watts), a headstrong and decent midwife in a
London hospital delivers the baby of a Russian immigrant, a sexually
abused 14-year-old girl. When the mother dies, Anna uses the girl's
diary that she found in her handbag to try to trace the baby's
biological father. She is half-Russian herself, and previously lost
her own baby, so we understand there's an emotional factor involved in
the search that she may only partly acknowledge to herself. She also
finds a card for the Trans-Siberian restaurant, the pulsing visual
heart of the film, which is owned by Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), a
boss in the Russian Mafia or Vory V Zakone, which translates "thieves
in law". Unfortunately, what Anna doesn't know is that Semyon is a
chief in the Russian mob, and his offer to translate the diary masks
his ulterior motive to get his hands on it at any cost.

We are then introduced into this disreputable Russian underworld,
which includes Semyon's violently unstable son, Kiril (Vincent
Cassell), and Kiril's enigmatic chauffeur and bodyguard Nikolai (Viggo
Mortensen.) What follows is a series of deadly games that threaten to
engulf both Anna and the newborn child.

Cronenberg reveals a closeted, seldom intimated subculture in the
Russian mafia, supplanting the imbalanced and hallucinatory Americana
of his last work with a shady London milieu, through a masterfully
administered course of events. Firstly, the throat slitting of a
Chechen gangster; secondly, the death of a hemorrhaging 14-year-old,
whose newborn baby is saved; thirdly, the cutting of its umbilical
cord, juxtaposed against the severed fingers of a to-be-disposed of
corpse; next, one of several hushed encounters between vory
'cleaner/chauffer' Nikolai and Anna, a midwife who seeks father;
later, a sex scene voyeured by the specter of Vincent Cassel, whose
greasy Russian mobster ushers the film's latent homoeroticism into the
open; and climatically, a much talked about knife fight of gruesome,
inerasable proportions.

As a mysterious figure of male ambivalence, Nikolai serves as the
family's "cleaner/ chauffeur ", dumping dead bodies in the River
Thames. At first glance, he seems to be a thug, but he also has
softness, and is therefore strong and delicate at the same time. When
we first meet Nikolai, he's almost dead inside because he lives in a
world of violence and as such is a violent person but there is also a
gentleness about him that comes as a surprise to Anna. His brutal
hardness is blended with sarcasm and a strange sort of charm, becomes
the center of the film, eventually picked by Semyon to be one of his
soldiers. Mortensen proves once again to be a brilliant actor, beyond
what people realize. He is sensational in the part, fully convincing
as a Russian ex-convict (He is in fact half-Danish), and this proves
once and for all that he's not just some handsome guy from The Lord of
the Rings. In tandem with "A History of Violence", Mortensen – once
again, terrific – reassumes the position of a man with a past, and
it's his hard-edged exterior and medusa-like stare that is so
essential to the film's pregnant mise-en-scene, from these diverse
elements, reflecting Faustian bargain at the end of the film.

Cassell is also great in the role of the volatile Kiril, next in line
for the throne, though patently unfit for the job. He tries to hide
his weaknesses behind a mask of cruelty and boastfulness. He manages
to make his vile character's conflicted adoration for Nikolai pathetic
and at the same time touching. While Mortensen is icily beguiling as
Nikolai, Cassel's Kirill is all heat and animal rage. His portrait of
a conflicted, damaged man killing himself with booze and recklessness
flirts with melodrama, but he expertly reins it, and the performance
is electric. The two play off of one another throughout the movie with
sharp contrasts: wisdom versus foolish courage, control versus
incontinence, nerve versus cowardice, calm nerves versus the shattered
wreck of a man living in the shadow of a terrifying father.

Even equally crucial is Watts,

Continue at
http://blog.nationmultimedia.com/betweentheframes/2008/03/13/entry-9