EVERY SIN LEAVES A MARK.
Anna Khitrova (Naomi Watts helps deliver a 14-year-old Russian girl’s baby, but the girl dies; looking to find out who she was, Anna enlists the help of Russian acquaintances without realizing that they are responsible for the girl’s death. David Cronenberg returns to organized crime (a subject in A History of Violence (2005)); the script shows interest in the rituals of this mob universe and how dominated it is by men who speak of honor but rarely practice it. Tough to watch, but interesting and even touching when it comes to Watts’s performance. Also memorable for a sequence where a naked Viggo Mortensen fights two assassins in a bathhouse.
2007-Canada-Britain. 100 min. Color. Produced by Robert Lantos, Paul Webster. Directed by David Cronenberg. Screenplay: Steve Knight. Cast: Viggo Mortensen (Nikolai), Naomi Watts (Anna Khitrova), Armin Mueller-Stahl (Semyon), Vincent Cassel, Sinéad Cusack, Jerzy Skolimowski.
Trivia: Kate Beckinsale was allegedly considered for the part of Anna.
Last word: “Viggo does incredible research on his own. When we started, he sent me this two-volume book, ‘Russian Criminal Tattoos’. And a friend of his, Alix Lambert, had done a documentary about Russian prison tattoos called ‘The Mark of Cain’. So they became the focus of our intense rewriting. Steve Knight had alluded to tattoos, but in the rewrites we brought that forward, and it gave the story a real visual and metaphorical center. And then there’s such a wealth of books about modern Russia and the disaster it is in so many ways. All of those things were fed into our production.” (Cronenberg, Film Comment)
