At the 82nd Venice Film Festival, Olivier Assayas’s film “The Wizard of the Kremlin”, based on Giuliano da Empoli’s novel of the same name, was shown to the press. The premiere, closely watched by Russian audiences, arrived without a visible publicity campaign on the Lido, even as posters for other competition entries covered the area.
Film critic Irina Karpova, writing for Novaya Gazeta Europe, says the adaptation largely preserves the tone of the book, in which Vladislav Surkov appears under the name Vadim Baranov and is portrayed as a disillusioned political strategist. The leading roles are played by Paul Dano and Jude Law, who portrays Vladimir Putin.
The opening scenes closely follow the novel: in 2019, Baranov, already out of politics, invites the narrator, a scholar of Yevgeny Zamyatin played by Jeffrey Wright, to his country estate outside Moscow. There he recounts his rise and later disillusionment. The screenplay was written by Assayas and Emmanuel Carrere, author of “Limonov,” who also appears in a brief cameo.
Karpova notes that the screen version of Baranov retains the main features of the literary character but omits several elements of Surkov’s unofficial biography. Instead, he is presented as a descendant of tsarist and Soviet aristocracy. Dano plays him with restraint and almost no overt emotion, while Law closely reproduces Putin’s gait, facial expressions, and gestures.
In one scene, Baranov says the goal is not to conquer Ukraine, but to plunge it into chaos.
Karpova argues that the film convincingly depicts some of the mechanisms associated with the “Russian world,” including the blending of falsehood and truth as a political technology. At the same time, in her view, this version of Russian history includes the apartment bombings, the Dubrovka theater siege, and the second Chechen war, but leaves out Anna Politkovskaya, Akhmat and Ramzan Kadyrov, and Alexei Navalny.
The film also includes characters corresponding to Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Boris Berezovsky. In Karpova’s account, the ending introduces a turn absent from the book and gives Dano’s character a more tragic status. In her view, this further draws the film into the discussion of hybrid war, fought not only on the battlefield but also in the information space.