The loudest reaction during both press screenings of Olivier Assayas’s The Wizard of the Kremlin at the Venice Film Festival happened before the film even began, as the Disney+ ident surprisingly popped up after your regular procession of European broadcasters and production companies. While the association of the major American studio with this particular film is yet to be divulged, what is clear is the dissonance between the home of Mickey Mouse and this satire about the Russian autocracy starring Jude Law as Vladimir Putin.
If an almost three-hour is-it-spoof-is-it-not directed by a French auteur featuring a handsome Brit as the infamous Russian autocrat sounds a bit odd, just wait until you see it. Adapted from Giuliano da Empoli’s eponymous novel, The Wizard of the Kremlin is fashioned as a biopic for Paul Dano’s Vadim Baranov, a successful TV producer, lover of all things art and Tupac Shakur fan who ends up as the unlikely advisor to Putin during the early days of his meteoric political career. (Baranov is fictional, but there are noted similarities between him and the very real Russian politician Vladislav Surkov.)
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We are ushered into this strange beast through the soothing voice of Jeffrey Wright’s narrator, an academic fascinated with Russian sociopolitics whose work earns him a rare invitation into Baranov’s isolated estate. His visit works as a nifty narrative device to walk us through the life of the mysterious kingmaker, from his cushy childhood as the son of a civil servant in Communist Russia, to the way that the freedom that came with the fall of the régime fuelled his burning creative urges, and then his early days as a television producer in a burgeoning private network owned by oligarch Boris Berezovski (Will Keen).
It is Berezovski who plucks the young and hungry producer from the loudly brash realm of television and into the quietly brash realm of politics, properly kicking off Assayas’s study of power as the driving force of modern Russia. Split into eight chapters, the film hammers this binary of the West as fixated on money and the East on sovereignty as if a recently discovered thesis, and, like a theatre undergrad first hearing about Chekov, this rapidly becomes grating.
What The Wizard of the Kremlin does have up its sleeve, however, is a welcome self-awareness of the ludicrousness of its existence, particularly when it comes to Law’s Putin. The English actor does away with the need for a pantomime accent or overt mannerisms in favour of leaning headfirst into this concoction that is not as much meant to represent the Russian president as Jude Law’s version of it. The result is a mesmerising amalgamation that fittingly lends itself to this idea of a dictator moulded and welcomed by the hands of pop culture.
Coming fast in the opposite lane is Dano’s Baranov, a performance coloured by the nagging self-consciousness of its performer. The overstretched early chapters portraying the spin doctor’s youth bring with them a laugh-out-loud attempt to pass off 41-year-old Dano for a 20-year-old, his beaming eyes trying to capture the wonder of seeing lesbians make out in a dirty toilet and men being guided by leather leashes in a cracking all-night party that epitomises the wildness of the new Russian youth. What follows never quite improves on the silliness of what precedes, but finds rare moments of inspiration when Dano sits across from Wright in the now, the clarity of acquired wisdom much more suitable to the natural sternness of the American actor.
As it stumbles towards its predictable final scene, The Wizard of the Kremlin fully abandons its attempt at riotous farce to try grasping at the sombre reality of the present. It is a commendable endeavour, but also one that completely misunderstands where the treasure chest of its premise lies, maddeningly pulling away from the welcome provocation of the absurd to add yet another desperate scream to the torturous echo chamber we are all currently trapped in.
