The Wizard Of The Kremlin
Jude Law is acquiring quite a portfolio of bellicose, blood-soaked tyrants. In the 2023 drama Firebrand, he played King Henry VIII. Now, in the absorbing political thriller The Wizard Of The Kremlin, he stars as Vladimir Putin, less gouty than Henry, and less prone to executing wives, but no less monstrous.
The Wizard Of The Kremlin, adapted by French director Olivier Assayas from the bestselling novel of the same name by Giuliano da Empoli, had its world premiere yesterday at the Venice Film Festival.
It is a riveting account of how political power evolved in Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and how it all ended up in the hands of a former KGB agent from St Petersburg.
The story is told from the perspective of a lightly fictionalised character called Vadim Baranov, played by Paul Dano and said to be based on Putin’s real-life spin-doctor Vladislav Surkov.
We meet Baranov through the useful if somewhat hackneyed device of a visiting US journalist (Jeffrey Wright). He has come to Moscow to research his biography of the long-dead satirist Yevgeny Zamyatin.
Baranov, now retired, turns out to be a Zamyatin enthusiast.
After making contact online, he invites the American to his handsome dacha, where the conversation turns to his own life and career, shown in a series of extended flashbacks.
By way of a short tangent, a few years ago, before Putin brought international pariah status on his country by invading Ukraine, I was privileged to serve on the jury of the Moscow Film Festival.
I was given an interpreter, a delightful fellow, who told me that much as he and his friends had exulted in the end of Communism, it had dismayed his parents and their generation, whose cast-iron social, cultural and political certainties went up in smoke practically overnight.
The Wizard Of The Kremlin makes that same observation. Baranov explains that his father, who ran a Soviet cultural institute, knew his days were numbered as soon as he saw Mikhail Gorbachev being handed a glass of milk during a live address on television. Milk, not vodka. It was a metaphor, as his father saw it, for the de-Russification of Russia.
But for Baranov, a new Russia means new opportunities. He becomes a theatre director, then a TV producer. At a decadent party, he is beguiled by a bright and beautiful singer, played by Alicia Vikander.
They are soon lovers, until she is lured away by his charismatic friend Dmitry (Tom Sturridge), who knows how to deal with a consignment of brandy that won’t sell for $50 a bottle; he jacks the price up to $500 a bottle and there’s a stampede.
That’s how the oligarchs become rich – through greed, folly and exhibitionism. It is the mid-1990s, also a time of ‘incredible violence’ in Moscow, when, as Baranov says, ‘men of no importance are escorted by private militias’ and car-bomb assassinations are commonplace.
But Baranov also knows that in Russia, unlike the West, what really counts is not money but ‘proximity to power’. He is befriended by another oligarch, Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen), who takes him to meet an ex-KGB man, now an up-and-coming politician. ‘He’s a modest guy, you’ll like him,’ he says.
It’s our introduction to Putin, nicely played by Law with scant attempt to suppress his south London vowels, and even looking passably like him (if you squint rather tightly).
The president, Boris Yeltsin, is ailing, so Berezovsky and Baranov persuade Putin to muscle his way into the Kremlin. ‘He’s no rocket scientist but for now he’ll do just fine,’ notes Berezovsky of Putin, a misjudgment not just regrettable but fatal. In 2013, the exiled Berezovsky is found dead at his home near Ascot. An open verdict is recorded.
As his power intensifies, Putin becomes known as the Tsar and Baranov as the ‘New Rasputin’. With the softly spoken Baranov at his side, we see Putin’s reasoning behind the second Chechen War, the annexation of the Crimea, and his obsession with the 2014 Winter Olympics in the Black Sea resort of Sochi.
And we are left in no doubt that his global view is coloured, in his eyes, by the post-Soviet ‘humiliation’. Returning from a G20 summit, he rages that he was treated as if he was the leader of some ‘insignificant’ country like Finland.
Cleverly, Assayas presents all this not as recent history dramatised by a blend of fact and informed supposition, but as a lively thriller. It makes sense to remember that.
After all, none of us should get our geopolitical education from the movies. But if The Wizard Of The Kremlin doesn’t leave you with a clearer insight into why Putin ordered his tanks into Ukraine in 2022, it hasn’t done its job.
- There is not yet a UK release date for The Wizard Of The Kremlin
