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The Times BFI 51st London Film Festival opens with a shaving scene that would have amused Sweeney Todd. A Kurdish barber, not a stone’s throw from Fleet Street, forces his teenage son to cut the throat of a dangerous customer. They lock the body in a freezer and wait for the Russian Mafia to turn up with their gardening tools.

"You might want to leave the room now,” says Viggo Mortensen, casually stubbing out a cigarette on his tongue. When the carefully pruned corpse is eventually fished from the Thames a week later by the Metropolitan Police it doesn’t have teeth, fingers, or toes. The only distinguishing marks on the body are the tattoos: the badges of honour collected by East European soldiers from army units, Siberian gulags, and gangs.

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Background

• London just capital for directors

• Naomi Watts wows on opening night

• Tony Leung is in the mood for lust

• Pretty boy Brad Pitt grows up

• Brothers grim

Background

• Eastern Promises

• Viggo Mortensen joins the underworld's cast

• Michael Moore's healthy scepticism

• Are you kidding?

• Laura Linney, accidental screen queen

Related Links

• Viggo Mortensen joins the underworld's cast

• David Cronenberg's actual bodily yarn

• David Cronenberg

David Cronenberg’s gripping thriller about London’s criminal new order puts flesh and blood on some ugly topical fears. This is not the first time that a festival opening night film has illuminated the capital’s immigrant underworld. The scriptwriter of " Eastern Promises " , Steve Knight, exposed the ghastly trade of cash for kidneys in Stephen Frears’s 2002 film, Dirty Pretty Things. But the predatory roots of organised crime go far deeper in Eastern Promises. What’s remarkable about Knight’s script for Cronenberg is that it feels within touching distance of alarming truths despite the layers of romance and melodrama.

Mortensen is a “chauffeur” for a Russian Mafia don, Semyon (played by a fabulously sly Armin Mueller-Stahl) , who owns a respectable restaurant and a thriving business trafficking under-age girls from Ukraine. Mortensen is a chilly and seedy Russian mercenary with slicked back hair, pitch black sunglasses, and an undertaker’s professional disinterest. He remains expressionless for entire reels while ordered about by Semyon’s unpredictable and psychotic son (Vincent Cassel).

The drama hinges on an act of charity. A young midwife, Anna (Naomi Watts), turns up at Semyon’s restaurant after a 14-year-old girl dies in a north London hospital after giving birth. The only clue to the girl’s identity is a diary written in Russian about her harrowing life as a sex slave.

The naked – indeed naïve -- candour of Watts gives the plot its most vertiginous twists. She is a pale and lonely beauty, half-in-love and half-jealous of an exotic culture that seems to bind all Russian immigrants into a colourful family. She has no idea about the incriminating worth of the diary, or the poisonous and silky traps that Semyon lays for her.

Why Mortensen looks out for Watts is a mystery mere mortals can only guess at. As in Cronenberg’s previous film A History of Violence, the motives of the hero are inscrutable secrets. Mortensen’s survival skills are something else. There is a sauna scene in Eastern Promises that makes James Bond’s famous sink-bashing kill in a public lavatory look like light relief.

But this isn’t a film about impressive and bloody stunts. This is a film about the horror and kindness of strangers, and an industry that enslaves young lives. Cronenberg doesn’t paint theme-parks; this is the curb-crawling reality. This is London.

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