Olivier Assayas has adapted Giuliano de Empoli’s novel a clef “The Wizard of the Kremlin.“ Floating between fiction (or other layers of perception) and reality has interested Assayas before, but his films have rarely been as political as THE WIZARD OF THE KREMLIN. There is a certain absurdity to this, because the film's actual thesis is the disappearance of politics, or rather what Habermas called deliberative democracy – a society in which political decisions are made through the exchange of arguments.

Through a shared interest in the dystopian novel “We“ (1924) by Yevgeny Zamyatin, US journalist gains access to the (fictional) former Putin advisor Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano), who is largely based on the real former Putin advisor Vladislav Surkov. Baranov’s story begins in the 90s, at the time of Boris Yeltsin’s government, who will soon be replaced by a president who is also subservient to the oligarchs.

Baranov is an avant garde theater director and stages “We“ like a play. A former classmate and ex-bohemian who got rich doing shady businesses gets him into contact with the oligarch and media mogil Dimitri Sidirov. Baranov becomes a reality TV producer. His mentor Sidorov eventually makes him an advisor to the presidential candidate chosen by a group of oligarchs, the seemingly colorless bureaucrat Vladimir Putin (Jude Law). Putin quickly makes it clear that any loyalty towards someone besides him is pointless. In Russia, it’s not money that rules over everything, but power itself. Baranov becomes Putin’s chief strategist.

Baranov's sources cited in the film are not particularly original: Machiavelli's “The Prince“ and the courtly strategy texts of Baltasar Gracián. But his cynical ruthlessness and counter-intuitive tactics have nothing in common with the comparatively harmless intelligence strategies of the West. He founds and supports opposition parties himself, keeping them under control and dissolving them when necessary, and he develops a social media strategy designed to sow discord and spread perpetual anger. When a PR agent informs him that they are broadcasting their own messages across all channels, he berates the agent's boss. There are no "messages," he insists; the only goal is to create chaos. Destabilizing the enemy is the objective, not changing their beliefs. Arguments are irrelevant.

Paul Dano plays Baranov as a cynic who always speaks with a quiet, flat voice and looks at the world with dead eyes. Baranov has no charisma whatsoever, but he is effective. The titular “wizard“ doesn’t evokes the historical Rasputin as much as the the chaos wizards of the 20th century and their postmodern pop epigones such as Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea (“Illuminatus”), if one turns their ideas, which were actually directed against dogmatism, into absolute practical nihilism. A remedy against the Russian political destruction machine does not yet seem to have been found. THE WIZARD OF THE KREMLIN is a film that appears to be more harmless than it is.

Tom Dorow

Translation: Elinor Lewy