Post-Soviet Russian history is treated as the stuff of dark fairy-tale in French director Olivier Assayas’s uneven new feature, The Wizard of the Kremlin, which is screening in competition at the Venice Film Festival.
Adapted from the prize-winning novel by Giuliano da Empoli, the film chronicles the rise and fall of Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano), the “new Rasputin,” as he is styled. He’s a fictional figure, reportedly partly inspired by Russian spin doctor and politician Vladislav Surkov, but most of the other major characters are drawn from reality. Jeffrey Wright plays an American author fascinated by Vadim, who we initially learn has disappeared into the shadows following years as Vladimir Putin’s right-hand man. Out of the blue, the author is summoned to meet Vadim at his country house deep in the forest, and to hear his story.
We learn in flashback that Vadim is from a once prominent family that lost its influence when the Soviet Union collapsed. We see him in the heady days of the early Nineties in Moscow, when he was a radical young theatre director. He falls in love with Ksenia (Alicia Vikander), a mysterious artist who puts on S&M performances at wild parties. She soon forsakes him, though, for Dmitri Sidorov (Tom Sturridge), a handsome and clever chancer who is getting very wealthy, very quickly. Vadim then moves into television, where he is hired by leading businessman Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen). It’s Berezovsky who masterminds Putin’s rise to power after an ill and enfeebled President Yeltsin steps down. For reasons the film never fully explains, Vadim promptly throws in his lot with Putin, played here by Jude Law.
In what could easily have been a banana skin of a role, Law is surprisingly sure-footed. The British star has clearly studied his subject closely. He captures the Russian president with metronomic precision – his mannerisms, his cunning, his smirks and scowls. Sensibly, he’s relatively restrained in the role, too, projecting an air of intense but suppressed fury whenever he feels humiliated – as well as a keenness to show off his buff torso.
What is bound to rankle many viewers, however, is the film’s softball portrayal of Putin overall. As shown here, he is no monster. The ex-KGB man is a brutal but resilient figure who provides the “vertical” leadership that, it’s suggested, many Russians craved after the “horizontal” chaos of the Nineties, when the oligarchs were running amok and growing filthy rich at everybody else’s expense. Given the ongoing war in Ukraine, it doesn’t seem like the most propitious moment for a movie like this.
At its best, The Wizard of the Kremlin has some of the same anarchic energy found in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. But it’s ultimately very short on emotional heft – its characters are sketchily drawn, and Vadim is a strangely aloof figure, his motivations impossible to fathom. Two other films premiering in Venice this week, Alexander Sokurov’s monumental, archive-based Director’s Diary, and Alexander Rodnyansky’s autobiographical Notes of a Criminal, deal with the consequences of the break-up of the Soviet Union with much greater insight and nuance than is found here.
Dir: Olivier Assayas. Starring: Paul Dano, Alicia Vikander, Tom Sturridge, Will Keen, Jeffrey Wright, Jude Law. 156 minutes.
‘The Wizard of the Kremlin’ is awaiting UK release
