Low Life.(FILM)(Eastern Promises)(Movie review)

The worst thing about this movie is the title. Eastern Promises--it sounds like a cruise ship, or a pricey spa, or a bodice-ripper set in Meiji Japan. Instead, David Cronenberg's new film takes place in the underworld of a rainswept London, where the waterways carry bobbing corpses, the steam baths double as slaughterhouses, and the only ripped bodices belong to strung-out Russian prostitutes with the hopeless eyes of the damned. "The city of whores and queers," says Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), an avuncular restaurateur who may or may not be part of vory v zakone--the fearsome top dogs of the Russian Mafia.

The soft-focus title notwithstanding, Cronenberg's movie starts with a jolt: A Chechen mobster has his throat sawn open in a barbershop, and a young pregnant woman bleeds to death in a London hospital, leaving behind a diary (in Russian) and an unclaimed child. A midwife named Anna (Naomi Watts) snatches the diary and covets the baby. She tells her family--an English mother, a bilious Russian uncle--that she just wants to track down the child's relatives, but she has wounds of her own (a recent miscarriage, a broken heart), and the recklessness of a woman who doesn't know exactly what she's looking for.

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What she finds is an immigrant demimonde, where Old World charm coexists with modern gangsterism: The heroin and whores in the basement pay for the Nutcracker-style Christmas parties going on upstairs. Eastern Promises shares a screenwriter with 2003's Dirty Pretty Things, which likewise dealt with crime and punishment in immigrant London, and both movies envision Britain's capital as a lawless crossroads for the rootless and the ruthless of a globalizing world. But where Dirty Pretty Things was primarily concerned with the immigrant as victim--serving up the adorable Audrey Tautou as an asylum-seeker caught up in an organ-trafficking scheme--Cronenberg's film emphasizes the immigrant as predator, sending its heroine out as a sheep among the Russian wolves.

Not that Anna is entirely innocent of what she's getting herself into. She belongs to the world of the bourgeoisie--of the "ordinary people," as her anxious mother puts it--but her uncle is a former KGB man, with enough knowledge of the world on the other side of the looking-glass to warn her against stepping through. Yet his desire to protect her ends up backfiring: By refusing to translate the dead girl's diary ("Do you always rob the bodies of the dead?" he asks Anna), he forces her to look for help in all the wrong places--and particularly in the ...