Is it too early for cinematic versions of the story of the rise of a personality who continues to dominate contemporary world politics like Vladimir Putin? This is certainly not what writer Giuliano Da Empoli, who published the novel ‘Le mage de Kremlin’ in 2022, and director
Olivier Assayas, who brought it to the screen in 2025 in an English-language version called ‘The Wizard of the Kremlin‘, believe. In addition, they achieved this with the tools of political fiction mixed with a dose of thriller. The editorial success was remarkable. A bestseller on the French market, the book won the Grand Prix for Novel of the French Academy and the Honoré de Balzac Prize, losing the Goncourt Prize ‘in the tie-break’, after 14 rounds of voting, only thanks to the decisive vote of the president of the jury, who preferred a competing novel. Da Empoli‘s book, written in 2020 but published in April 2022, had a special resonance in the context of that political whirlwind caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that followed the pandemic in a sequence of events that could not have been anticipated by any writer’s imagination. It would probably have been successful anyway, as it is a well-written book that brings important events and issues to the reader’s attention, but the current situation amplified its impact. The film, made three years later, is still acutely relevant. Political fiction reflects reality or perhaps tries to decipher and clarify it, but the experienced filmmaker Olivier Assayas did not give up on the tools that can attract the attention of an audience that is not necessarily interested in international politics. However, not everything succeeded to him in this film.
The story mixes real characters, with their names we know from the news, with some completely fictional and with others that transparently mask other real personalities. An expert in Russian literature on a documentary trip to Moscow is invited to a ‘dacha’ located in the frozen landscape of the endless forests of Russia for a conversation full of confidences by the enigmatic Vadim Baranov, once an artist, reality show producer and gray eminence of Vladimir Putin, nicknamed the Tsar. Retired from politics, Baranov talks about his family and youth, life in Russia in the 1990s, his contribution to the discovery and political rise of the Tsar since 1999 and his experience in the circles of power. Vadim Baranov, the ‘Wizard of the Kremlin’, is a fictional character, but largely inspired by the personality of an advisor and ideologue of Vladimir Putin until 2020. What follows after the introductory scenes can be described as a docu-drama that covers the over two decades of the political and ideological changes that Russia went through from the 1990s to the mid-2010s. Baranov’s family belonged to the elites of officials and intellectuals of various regimes in Russia. His father had been an academic and high-ranking official in the Soviet hierarchy. The son makes a career in the post-Soviet period and reaches the circles of power with the rise of Putin. The young artist evolves over time from a creator of art to a creator of reality, among his ‘contributions’ being the concept of ‘sovereign democracy’. He lives in the world of oligarchs and power-hungry politicians, but the character who dominates the entire story, without being present all the time on screen, is undoubtedly Vladimir Putin. As viewers, we witness Putin’s metamorphosis and the reorientation of Russia.
Olivier Assayas warns his viewers from the beginning that what they will watch is a fictional product based on real events and characters. To make the film accessible to an international audience, it is spoken in English, with a few documentary inserts in Russian. Some characters mimic Russian accents, others do not. I believe that this aproach lacks authenticity and I found excessive the caricaturization of some of the characters, in contrast to the soberty of others. I did not like at all the way in which Paul Dano, an actor I have appreciated in several other films, played the role of Vadim Baranov. Monotonous and lacking in complexity, the actor failed to be credible both when he played the character in his idealistic youth and when he becomes Putin’s image-building man and ideologue, and even much less when explaining his evolution. Jude Law manages to physically bring Putin to the screen, but his character remains as shrouded in secrets as the politician. Alicia Vikander is Ksenia, the hero’s life partner, romantic disappointment and then again partner. Unfortunately, she did not have enough text to give life to a character who could have been much more interesting. ‘The Wizard of the Kremlin‘ is a docu-drama and a political thriller that I watched with great interest because of the subject, but which disappointed me at times in its execution. The evolution of Russia and the role played by Putin represent one of the most dramatic and significant episodes in the history of the first decades of our century. The courage to approach them when they are still hot topics is welcome. This movie will be followed by other that will deal with the era and the subject. Some will do it, I hope, better.