Cronenberg's films have always had their own characteristics, with their own style, horror, and violence, but they are obscure, cold, and dark... They are not films of young literary and artistic young people, nor are they pictures of fighting and killing. From the films he directed, it can be seen that he has a persistent belief in violence and seems to be looking for the source of violence and what consequences it has in society. Eastern Promises is mainly a story triggered by a diary left by a 14-year-old girl who died in childbirth. In order to find the truth, Anna half-footed to the mafia society, lifted the mysterious mask of the Russian mafia, and secretly murdered brutally. , Dirty sex trades are shown one by one, but not all gangs have no justice at all. The images of Viggo, Kirill, and Semyon are portrayed incisively and vividly, with the feeling of the Russian godfather. The film is generally a film about Russian mafia murder, betrayal, revenge, karma, and love. The film reflects many social issues, not to mention the brutal phenomenon behind the scenes of the Mafia. I don't know if anyone noticed some other social issues that were mentioned slightly in the movie: racial inequality. Stepan, the different races that Anna's uncle mentioned can never be combined. Otherwise, why would Anna have a miscarriage? It's a kind of discrimination against black people. In addition to the discrimination against blacks, there is also discrimination against homosexuality, queer, which has to mention that Kirill played by Vincent is very expressive. There are also issues such as inequality and poverty among people, which are slightly involved. But the biggest feature of the East's commitment is to use the aesthetics of violence to show what is really happening in society: violence, sex trafficking, to expose the "ugly" (perhaps not called ugly) of human nature. Not shy about showing violence on camera, cutting throats, cutting fingers, and inserting knives into eyeballs! The unavoidable desire in the human heart is nakedly presented with exaggerated methods. ...the same goes for the naked sex scenes, which reflect the miserable lives of prostitutes, the phenomenon of sex trafficking. Speaking of violent scenes, the most exciting and classic is Viggo's naked fight scene in the bathroom, which is really exciting and vividly displayed! The only scene in the film that is so handsome to me is as follows.
I think there must be a root cause for the violence, maybe there is a little bit of performance in the movie, maybe because of hatred, betrayal, in order to save their own lives, so the internal punishment of mafia is to kill, directly cut off, probably they survived The only way. Who is not to survive. There are several symbols in the story, the first one is the Russian Mafia, representing the dark forces, cruel and inhuman brutal gangsters. The second is Anna. Although she is a bit silly, she generally represents the warmth of the world. The third is Nikolai, who is in the gang as an undercover identity, representing justice in evil and meaningful. In the 20th century, the emergence of various mafia is very frequent, what Russian and Italian. In fact, the gang itself is a small society. It is an organism with its own rules and operating mechanism. For example, it is reflected in the movie. If you violate the rules, you will be punished and killed. It feels that the most important thing for them is betrayal, so the gangs also operate on a principle of justice... Maybe they are more affectionate than ordinary people, and hypocrites will always be Terrible than the real villain. I think this sentence is very good. The society needs to govern the gangs, but the existence of the gangs cannot be avoided. The police need the existence of the gangs to govern the society. A family of cops. Another thing worth mentioning is the name of the movie, which is rather obscure. I think in addition to the heroine's silent promise to the little girl to send her back to Russia, there are also political issues involved. Balanced development and the establishment of a peaceful and free Europe have not been realized for various reasons, which is also the hidden meaning of the title "promise". Another interesting thing is tattoos. In Russia, tattoos represent their identity. Prison tattoos indicate what crime they have committed. There are also gang tattoos, just like in the movie, each gangster has its own special tattoo. The other is that homosexuality is a pair of eyes, and so on. Below is the meaning of the protagonist's tattoo in the movie, which was captured on IMDb.
The reason why I didn't give 5 stars is: the kiss between Nikolai and Anna was a bit abrupt at the end, I felt that there should not be such a feeling between them, and even if there was, it didn't need a kiss to express it.
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