There’s a conflict in the work of director Olivier Assayas between a desire to make something broader and more conventionally entertaining, and underlying instincts that are dry, and frankly, a bit boring. The casting of Jude Law as Vladimir Putin in The Wizard of the Kremlin exemplifies this conflict. Law is a dead ringer for the Russian president – a funny reality for an actor who was always consider a matinee idol – and he has a proven comedic presence, which is useful in a film conceived as a satire. Yet Assayas doesn’t do anything funny with him, and like much of the material in this film, the Putin sections sort of lie there flatly.

This conflict is all the more frustrating because we know Assayas is a good filmmaker and is always making thoughtful, politically relevant content. What could be more relevant than a film in which one of the world’s most notorious despots, involved in one of the world’s deadliest current wars, is a central character. Yet this is not Assayas’ first project that can be summarised as a series of instances of “and then this happened,” without what feels like a narrative spine with solidly identifiable themes.

The yearning for something more accessible is clear in the design of this film. The Wizard of the Kremlin is structured as a series of chapters in the life of its protagonist, fictitious Russian power broker Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano), which does have this episodic nature that can limit Assayas’ effectiveness. But each chapter is introduced with flashy on-screen graphics, and Dano, soft spoken in a manner that is almost sinister, takes us in as a co-conspirator in his narration, introducing us to an unfamiliar world in a way the best narrators can.

Baranov is involved in an extended interview with American professor Rowland (Jeffrey Wright), who has written about modern Russian political history and starts as the narrator himself before handing the baton to Baranov. Rowland is visiting Baranov’s wintry home outside Moscow, where he’s in semi-enforced retirement after whispering in the ear of Putin throughout the Russian president’s rise to power over the last two decades. With a Mona Lisa smile fixed permanently to his face, Baranov seems to find no greater joy, currently, than taking his daughter to school – though still has plenty of stories to tell about the exciting life that has brought him to this point.

That life begins after the liberation of Russia from communism, in which an early 90s Moscow resembles other great European cities in terms of freedoms of speech and expression that had been verboten. The KGB may still be keeping tabs, but that doesn’t stop a performance artist like Ksenia (Alicia Vikander) from confrontational work in which she’s got a naked man on a leash and sings lyrics addressed cheekily to “comrade.” Baranov forms a relationship with her and uses her in his own work in the theatre.

But this is only the first incarnation of the astute Baranov, who is a master at reading situations. He breaks up with Ksenia before she has a chance to break up with him, and it’s just the start of his keen ability to see the correct play in any situation. His ambitions soon turn political as he gets in with real-life media oligarch Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen), who first helps an ailing and ineffectual Boris Yeltsin cling to power, and then positions Putin, a lower level government functionary, as prime minister and ultimately president.

There’s a real sense of scholarly attention to the details of Russia during the approximately 30-year period covered by this film. We feel the same liberation from the former Soviet strictures that the characters feel, as this wild and woolly period is characterised not only by risque parties with performance artists, but also by the sort of outlaw jockeying for power that results in gunfire and car bombs exploding. As the country is finding itself, we’re finding ourselves at home within this narrative, waiting to see what comes next.

But as the government comes back under stricter control, so does this film, and we miss the early passages as much as (at least some of) the characters do. Since the film is about Russian history, The Wizard of the Kremlin has a probably unfortunate point of comparison that already exists in the marketplace, which is Armando Ianucci’s The Death of Stalin. It isn’t clear that Assayas wanted to make a film with as much embedded humour, and sometimes downright silliness, as that one. But maybe he should have. The Wizard of the Kremlin continues flashing its promise in that regard without ever fully delivering.

The film is based on the 2022 novel by Giuliano Da Empoli, so some of its structure was established there. However, that can’t fully account for certain narrative sins that any adaptation has the chance to avoid if it so chooses. One of these is the use of Wright as the American professor, to whom we return in between these chapters Baranov is unspooling for us. At one point Baranov says that no one is safe in Russia, “not even you,” which seems like a veiled threat against the professor. Since we’re already talking Russian history, that threat should function in the narrative the same way as Chekhov’s gun functions in a narrative – in other words, the gun needs to go off. This one never does, and Rowland has the most passive of roles in this story, which sometimes makes us wonder what he’s even doing here.

The dissatisfactions again come back to Law’s Putin, who held all the promise of The Wizard of the Kremlin and who also symbolises the ways the film underachieves. Law is really good here. He even seems to blink the same way Putin blinks. He’s done the study necessary to give us a good skewering of Putin. And then it just feels like he’s not in the movie all that much, all told. Olivier Assayas has never been one who wanted to deliver us traditional narrative satisfactions, and sometimes that leaves his films feeling less than.

 

The Wizard of the Kremlin opens today in Australian cinemas.