It is almost an hour in “The Wizard of the Kremlin” before Vladimir Putin (Jude Law) presents himself, but as soon as he does, giving off calm anger and threat, he puts the film with laser orientation. The law, with burning eyes and a tight grimace, plays Putin taking the total command – whatever the room in which he is and the film. He asserts himself with wild decination rooted in the animal cunning.
The way the law plays it, Putin is something almost scary than a monster – a rational Tyrant, a man with whom to play, or even in disagreement with, at your own risk. He does not start with the coveting power (the powers in place came to him), but he believes that raw power, from the summit, are what the Russian people want. He may be right. (In a scene, we are told that when they were asked in a survey to name their favorite chief, the Russians always choose Stalin.) I hope that the law did not play the role with his British accent informed of Cockney Bourru – he would have been better if he had adopted a Russian accent, to capture the abrupt of Putin more. However, he perfectly channels the glare of Putin’s cold blood, the infusing of a reptilian charisma. The real Vladimir Putin has a special duality: his eyes seem to want to kill you, his mouth does not move a muscle. And the law nails them. His Putin explains that he will restore the vertical authority that has come out of Russia – a disturbing message. However, whenever he is on the screen, we as Putin, because he is a gangster-autocrat of such a tail. We always want to see it more, no less.
It was the end of the 90s, and until that time, we watched a portrait of Russia, after the fall of the Soviet Union, like a hollow and an excess capitalist – almost a decadent parody of freedom, with young people who break in the nightclubs hearing in the West. The Russian President, Boris Yeltsine, is a sick drunk who is so ineffective that at one point, he must be wedged on his chair to give a television address. Russia needs a new leader, and Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen), a sly oligarch, has helped assemble the party of Unity, a team of oligarchs and governors wishing to find a prowess prime minister that they can raise in a glorified puppet. Putin seems a good choice, because he is the head of the Federal Security Service (the successor to the KGB), and they assume that he will remain a buttoned state bureaucrate who knows how to take orders. But they are wrong. They radically underestimated him.
Putin, in fact, is not the main character of “the sorcerer of the Kremlin”. It would be Vadim Baranov, a former avant-garde theater director and reality TV producer who is a comrade of Berezovsky, and who becomes the manipulator of the right hand of Putin-a Machiavellian guru / assassin of the media who orchestrates the public image of Putin and understands all kinds of ways of neutralizing his enemies. It is like a merger of Mark Burnett, Marshall McLuhan and Roger Stone. “The Wizard of the Kremlin” is adapted from a novel in 2022 by Guiliano Da Empoli, and the character of Baranov (a fiction riff on Vladislav Surkov, who was Putin’s real ghost advisor) is played by Paul Dano, a cameleon that looks and acts different here that you have ever seen it before.
His Baranov has a big pasty white moon face, surmounted by a series of ugly Russian haircuts (hipster bowl of twenty years cut; short and severe, drah-drone ‘do). But in this slightly eccentric look, Dano gives a cunning and insinuious performance. He too speaks in a British accent, in this case a silver chic, and he delivers each line with an unclean height just on this side of Smirky, as if he floated truths that he alone could see. Baranov’s paradox is that he is a brilliant guy who is also, at a certain level, an empty ship. He will do everything you need to support the increasingly ruthless diet of Putin, and he does so without a compliance, as if the world of political images was a giant 3D failure made to manipulate.
I would like to be able to say that “the magician of the Kremlin” was a film as captivating as the Putin of Law, or the one who exercises the total amoral fascination of the postmodern totalitarian intrigue of Baranov. But the film, directed by Olivier Assayas (from a script which he co-written with Emmanuel Carrère), is both absorbent and diffuse. It is episodic to a fault, and despite these two ACE performances, he never finds an energetic dramatic center. In the soul, it is really just a visually opulent television film – the history of the rise of Putin in the 2000s, which should, in theory, have the kick of a mule, except that many new actions are the old actions, and nowadays, it tends to be exceeded in our imaginations by Russian society. He has become an autocrat of the most extreme nature, leaving an epic trace of blood.
You could almost characterize “The Wizard of the Kremlin” as an equivalent of the world of Russia of “The Apprentice”, the drama Rise of Donald Trump which was published in 2024 with a lot of fanfare and, ultimately, not much public interest. In this film, Trump was educated in the paths of heartless power of Roy Cohn; Here, Putin is enrolled in the semiotics of the cunning of Baranov propaganda, the genius of dark media. But “The Apprentice” was the most convincing of the two films; It made you look at. “The Wizard of the Kremlin” lasts two and a half hours, and part of everything rises, because it has this quality of another which is the brand of the film made for television. There is no doubt that Assayas, to his best (“personal buyer”, “summer hours”, “carlos”), is a bigger filmmaker than that, but in “The Wizard of the Kremlin”, he did not really solve the script problem – how not only the things that Baranov does, but attracts us in a powerful identification with him.
Dano’s performance, although delectable at a certain level, is also more like a note. We are kept up to what Baranov really feels what he does. There is a standard – Baranov, retired framing system is interviewed in his country house by an American author (the formidable Jeffrey Wright). And Baranov receives a romantic relationship, which dates back to the early 90s, when he met Ksenia (Alicia Vikander), a singer and a fetard who becomes a teacher of technology and finally finished with Baranov. Vikander cheek with a skilled spark, but I have never “worried” about this relationship – it seems that it is there to humanize Baranov in one way or another.
The film, with Baranov as a tourist guide to Scoundrel, is making its way through some of the greatest successes of deception in 21st century Russia. We see how the bombing of apartments in the suburbs of Moscow (which many claimed, from the start, for having been a plot of Putin) were used to increase fear and propel war in Chechnya, how the orange revolution in the visionary plan of Baranov for online infiltration of Russia in America. Is it a question of spreading propaganda or of supporting a presidential candidate? No, it’s about launching all possible crackpot things against the wall so that the follow -up chaos makes us all nuts. (Sorry, but I think the Americans on social networks have done a fairly good job alone.) However, even if “the Kremlin magician” flirts with a film of ideas, he lights up and comes out of things. It rarely remains in a place for a long time to let us suck our breath on the way in which Putin’s Russia has announced what could prove to be the new autocratic world.
