Jude Law as Vladimir Putin? It’s a casting decision so absurdly flattering to the Russian president that you’d be forgiven for wondering if it was made as part of an FSB psy-op. In fact, this meaty political procedural from Oliver Assayas is an adaptation of a French novel from 2002, in which a Moscow trash-television producer – persuasively played here by Paul Dano – who proves instrumental in the forging of the Putin political brand.
Intriguingly, no attempt is made to disguise Law’s debonair good looks, nor his honeyed English accent. Then again, had Putin been depicted as a malevolent gnome – as he was in the Russian equivalent of Spitting Image until the show was unceremoniously pulled in 2000; an event depicted in the film – it would have been harder to buy him as the cruelly charismatic operator this story requires.
Besides, while hardly a lookalike, Law does get the familiar mannerisms spot-on: the coy, heavy-lidded glower; the weird, sausagey pout; the near-constant air of heavily suppressed private amusement. As the film’s title suggests, there’s something of the Great Oz about him – an image of power built so fearsomely and persuasively that it’s only a matter of time before actual power begins to flow from it.
But it’s Dano’s (fictional) producer-turned-strategist, Vadim Baranov, who is ultimately the wizard of the title – and perhaps there is a pun buried in the original French: Le mage du Kremlin is responsible for L’Image de la Kremlin, after all. Vadim spends most of the film narrating the making of Putin to an American academic (Jeffrey Wright) – starting in the Yeltsin era when democracy was ushered in, along with all the wobbles that come with it.
As Vadim casts inane soaps and reality shows on the newly established Channel One, he notices the polls show an increasing number of his viewers are looking back with fondness to the Stalin era, when Russia’s might and drive were global forces to be reckoned with. He and the channel’s oligarchical owner, Boris Berezovsky, decide to find and groom a new political figurehead who can harness this energy: Berezovsky is played by Will Keen, who oddly enough won an Olivier in 2023 for playing Putin in the Peter Morgan play Patriots, which also described the same rise to power. In Yeltsin’s newly appointed secret service director, the two are convinced they’ve found their candidate – and just like that, a tsar is born.
It’s smart and watchable in a miniseries sort of way, and sets the current war in Ukraine in an instructive wider context – while Dano is ideally cast as the unreadable vizier serenely pulling strings behind the scenes. But it’s also overlong – Alicia Vikander’s rather arbitrary role as Vadim’s on-off lover feels as if it was added purely to break up the otherwise relentless maleness – and too often it defaults dramatically to soberly shot stern conversations between men in suits in panelled rooms. When planning the opening ceremony for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Vadim hymns the value of kitsch: “nobody wants your balalaikas,” he snaps at a more traditionally minded colleague. A little less good taste would have worked wonders here too.
Screening at the Venice Film Festival. A UK release has yet to be announced
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