Here’s a novel idea: Vladimir Putin had his own version of reality producer Mark Burnett aiding in his rise to power, morphing from a TV producer to a key figure in everything from Russia’s global social-media misinformation campaigns to its political assassinations to the war in Ukraine.
Well, maybe he didn’t have somebody just like that, though it’s the premise of French director Olivier Assayas’ “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” a long and dense portrait of Russian politics over the last 35 years that premiered on Sunday at the Venice Film Festival. The film, based on the satiric novel of the same name by Giuliano da Empoli, announces in its opening frames that it’s “an original work of fiction with artistic intent,” and says that its characters are fictional even while admitting that some of them are based on real people.
The character at the center of the film appears to be based on Russian politician and former Putin advisor Vladislav Surkovin, but he’s clearly fictionalized to become Vadim Baranov, a onetime student radical and reality producer who rises to power and wields that power in service of Putin. A Zelig type who finds himself in the thick of every significant movement in Russian politics since the early 1990s, Baranov is the lens through which da Empoli and now Assayas view Putin’s Russia through the dense and fitfully disturbing two hours and 36 minutes of this film.
While the character’s biography does bear more than a passing resemblance to Surkovin — but as played by Paul Dano, Baranov is something of a blank slate. If he’s conniving, ambitious and amoral, it’s because the Russia of these times was engineered by men like that – but to watch Dano in action is to see a mastermind who seems preternaturally calm, never even raises his voice. He’s not an Everyman so much as a No Man, and Dano plays him as an agent of chaos who never seems the least bit chaotic.
In a way, the whole point is how unlikely a mastermind this guy is. He speaks softly (and, like everyone else in the film, in lightly-accented English), and the doughy blandness of his features work as a way of masking the scheming that’s taking place beneath them. Dano’s Baranov wields power with a whisper, but as the film goes on the whisper contains a strain of regret and sadness that never goes away, even as it’s masquerading as strength. It’s an unnerving performance, circling the bluster of Jude Law’s Putin as he directs the anger that drives the man consistently and affectionately referred to as “the Tsar” rather than the president.
The film’s framing device takes a while to set up, but it features Jeffrey Wright as an American writer and expert on Russian geopolitics who visits Moscow and replies to an anonymous social-media post that quotes Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1924 dystopian novel “We,” considered a key influence on George Orwell’s “1984.” Wright’s character has recently published a magazine story pointing out how the mysterious Russian advisor Baranov had followed Zamyatin’s blueprint for establishing a totalitarian state, and he’s contacted by someone who wants to show him someone. Reason enough to hop into a car for parts unknown, right?
The anonymous person who summoned him turns out to be Baranov, of course, breaking his lengthy self-imposed exile to essentially tell his story to the American reporter, who pretty much disappears for all but the bookends of the film. The telling begins with the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of the wild Russian version of capitalism in the early 1990s, which turned the country into a dizzying experiment that didn’t go well.
Assayas co-opts the dizzying atmosphere for his filmmaking style; the opening stretch of the film is dense and frantic, a barrage of arguments about capitalism, communism and the Russian mind. The talk comes fast and furious, rarely stopping or even slowing down to give viewers a foothold. Everybody’s in a hurry to create a new Russia, including the artsy revolutionary students that attract Baranov, an aspiring avant garde theater director.
Of course, priorities change, and Baranov takes a job producing TV with the aim of mixing game shows and politics. That somehow puts him in the orbit of a reluctant politician and former KGB official named Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, who rebuffs them by saying, “Why me? I’m a civil servant.” But it turns out that the civil servant has ambitions and is willing to let the TV producer help him achieve them, as long as it remains clear that he calls the shots … and that, by the way, he probably going to want to invade Chechnya at some point.
“The Wizard of the Kremlin” dives into an exploration of the various ways of gaining and retaining power, and of the soul of the Russian nation. At one point, Putin grumbles that while he’s way ahead in the polls against his political opponents, he’s not as popular as Stalin even these days.
“People think Stalin is popular in spite of the killings,” he explains to Baranov. “Stalin is popular because of the killings.”
You could say that the film is a portrait of evil, but it’s about process more than ideology; it’s a nuts-and-bolts portrait of how you engineer evil. As the one person who always seems to be a couple of steps ahead of Baranov (which might be why he falls in love with her), Alicia Vikander is a valuable voice of morality, or at least a compromised version of morality, in a film in which most of the characters are far more concerned with how they can do something than with whether they should do it.
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The pace of the film slows down after its first hour, but the ideas remain dense and relentless. For a satire, there’s not much lightness here. Instead, with each new injustice of the Putin regime, Baranov finds a way to justify it and to make the regime more efficient. When students lead an uprising in Ukraine, Baranov recruits pro-Russian biker gangs, hooligans, communists, skinheads and religious fanatics; when the government supports a warehouse full of computer whiz kids coming up with ways to undermine voices from the West and get their own message out, Baranov scoffs and says that they forget about posting about politics and concentrate on sowing confusion and conspiracy theories to create mistrust and chaos.
“The Americans wrote the algorithm,” he says. “We’ll use it better than them.”
The hours of strategizing and maneuvering make for a massive and at times exhausting experience, but there’s certainly a timeliness to a story about Putin … and to a story about a powerful head of state getting a boost from a reality TV producer.
And mostly, “The Wizard of the Kremlin” is a loud, bold film that is held together by the quiet performance at its center. Dano always lets us see just how much effort Baranov is expending to hold himself in check, even as the film around him is more in the “go big or go home” camp.
Read all of our Venice Film Festival coverage here.