Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with director/co-writer Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep (1996)). Based on a novel by Giuliano Da Empoli. Emmanuel Carrère helped with the adaptation.
The idea was to take a look at how present-day Russia emerged from the Yeltsin era under Putin, coming at it from the view of confected "wizard of the Kremlin" Vadim Baranov (who I later read is a fictionalisation of Vadislav Surkov). He's played by Paul Dano who does not succeed in the lead. Dano delivers tonnes of exposition in a style that is intended to be coldly insinuating. He somehow lands manic pixie dream squeaky party girl Alicia Vikander who is tasked with breaking up the sausagefest. She knows what she wants (excess) but I was never convinced Dano could satisfy that, and she never seemed to enjoy her spoils anyway. For reasons often unknown she just disappears from large parts of the movie.
But the main draw was Jude Law who does function very effectively as Putin. He got the body language down and the brutality, opacity and sheer rapacious vacuity of the ideology across; it seems at this time Putin is paranoid but not as (insecurely) paranoid as he appears to be now. He too lacks much outward expression of the joy of being the new Tzar. Things flag whenever he's not on the screen.
Beyond the obvious decline in civil liberties the movie fails to explain what really changed since the 1990s; apparently it's just a game of oligarchs underpinned by some emotional manipulation of the masses, a fending-off of Western influence in Ukraine. The present-day framing interview with Jeffrey Wright seemed inessential. The visual metaphors are crass. Yorick Le Saux's cinematography is uninspired which is weird as he did far better with, for instance, Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), Little Women (2019), and Blitz (2024).
Glenn Kenny at Roger Ebert's venue: three-and-a-half stars.
