Olivier Assayas, “The Wizard of the Kremlin” (2025)
Based on the novel of the same name by Giuliano da Empoli, published in 2022, “The Wizard of the Kremlin” dramatises the political events of the final years of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s through the turbulent Boris Yeltsin era of the young Russian Federation in the 1990s to the early years of Vladimir Putin’s Presidency up to 2014, from the point of view of the film’s fictional hero / anti-hero Vadim Baranov. The Baranov character is inspired by the real-life figure of Vladislav Surkov, who held various managerial positions in advertising and public relations over the past 30 years, initially under Russian billionaire oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky (who appears in the film as Denis Sidorov) and then later as a public official under President Putin. Surkov held the position of Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Modernisation from 2011 to 2013 and was later Putin’s personal advisor before being dismissed in 2020. In 2022, Surkov was put under house arrest during Russia’s Special Military Operation in Ukraine for allegedly embezzling funds intended for the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine.
Yale academic Rowland (Jeffrey Wright) is visiting Moscow to research a biography of Yevgeny Zamyatin, the early 20th-century writer of the dystopian novel “We”, having previously written a political essay about the former Russian public official / spin doctor Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano). Rowland receives an invitation from Baranov (who has read the essay) to visit him at home. On arriving at Baranov’s rambling country dacha, Rowland is treated to Baranov’s recollections of his career, beginning back in the early 1990s as a film director after the fall of the Soviet Union and Yeltsin becoming the first President of the Russian Federation. Baranov works his way from directing underground arty films to television production, through which he meets new billionaire entrepreneur / oligarch Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen), under whom he helps to craft Yeltsin’s presidential election campaign in 1996. From there, Baranov pivots to join Vladimir Putin’s administration when the latter (played by Jude Law) becomes President of Russia in early 2000, and the PR man rises rapidly to become one of Putin’s faceless right-hand men with virtually a front-row seat to many significant events including the Moscow apartment bomb attacks in 1999, the Kursk submarine disaster in 2000 and the Sochi Winter Olympic Games in 2014.
The film never quite explains why Rowland should be privileged to hear Baranov’s story or why his presence is necessary, as the character is rarely more than a passive sounding board for Baranov’s opinions and declamations, even when Baranov occasionally says something that Rowland disagrees with. For that matter, Baranov himself appears as a one-dimensional figure, coming across as an observer rather than an actor even though he is responsible for crafting concepts like “sovereign democracy” and “the power vertical” (the governance model in which power is centralised in the executive function and proceeds top-down). Indeed, most characters in the film, especially Putin himself, are little more than the Russophobic stereotypes popularised in Western news media, their utterances being the very stuff scorned by Western news media, think tanks and academics as propaganda and misinformation. (Even though it’s an open secret by now that Western intelligence agencies and non-profit organisations financed or directed Color Revolutions in both Georgia and Ukraine in the early 2000s.) Various significant political events – well, those considered significant by the West, not necessarily by the Russian public who hardly get a look-in at all in the film – are organised chronologically but, shorn of their historical context, are little more than items on a shopping list to be ticked off. Viewers will come away with little idea of the importance of these events other than that they emphasise the apparently oppressive nature of Russian politics and society under Putin’s presidency and Putin himself as a cold-blooded, scowling tyrant.
The absence of ordinary people from this film endows it with a peculiar quality, in which everything Baranov and the people around him do seems to take place in a hermetic world cut off from reality. The obscene wealth enjoyed by Berezovsky, Sidorov and their groupies and hangers-on seems to come out of nowhere, when in fact these people obtained this wealth from the privatisation of corporate state entities in the immediate post-Soviet period – which meant that huge numbers of people employed by these entities were often sacked by the new owners and ended up living in poverty and misery. Where Russian people do rate a mention, they are treated with scorn, as unthinking sheep who need a strongman leader to tell them what to do and how high or far to jump into the abyss of socialism and nationalising natural resources that rightfully belong to the people anyway.
Of course, in this hermetic world, in hitching his wagon to people like Berezovsky and Sidorov, and later to Putin, Baranov ends up compromising his earlier, idealistic vision of living free under a democratic society – viewers can see this coming a mile away, however unconvincingly this actually plays out. Inevitably also, Baranov pays for placing ambition and greed over moral principles with his life – viewers can see that one coming out of the blue as well. Other characters, like his lover Ksenia (Alicia Vikander), see through Baranov’s amoral character but in the conduct of their own lives, rootless and addicted to power and wealth, they are no better than he is.
After all is said and done, in a film of some of the worst Russophobic stereotypes about individuals, and even about Russian people and their culture – there are occasions throughout the film where Russian people enjoying classical music or opera are being mocked (when in fact, due to their history, Russian people really are much closer to Western culture of the past, the culture that produced classical music and operas) – and the character of Russian people and the society they have, viewers are likely to come away knowing much less about Russia and its people than they did before seeing the film. There are much better ways to spend nearly two and a half hours of your time, than to watch this film.