Giuliano da Empoli’s smash-hit satirical novel The Wizard of the Kremlin, about a Putin spin doctor called Vadim Baranov and based on shadowy Russian politician Vladislav Surkov, has now been converted into an exasperatingly laborious and literal-minded movie, burdened with endless dull voiceover. It has been written for the screen by its estimable director Olivier Assayas, working with the formidable author and reportage journalist Emmanuel Carrère; Carrère in fact has a cameo here, playing a supercilious French figure at a raucous Moscow student party in the early 90s, patronisingly informing the young people present that it was the communism they’ve just rejected that really believed in the arts.
The action takes us through the 1990s decline of ailing president Boris Yeltsin and the promotion of FSB chief Vladimir Putin as prime minister by entrenched oligarchic interests who assume he will be their apparatchik puppet. Through the eyes of our strangely cynical media-manipulator hero, we see Putin’s presidential election triumph in 2000, the sinking of the Kursk submarine, which tested the president’s neo-Stalinist ruthlessness in ignoring public-opinion pressure orchestrated by unreliable courtier and media magnate Boris Berezovsky (who was destined for a lonely death in UK exile), the Chechen wars, the annexation of Crimea, the development of internet black ops and bot farms, and Putin’s growing hatred of Ukraine. Will Keen plays the bullish and hubristic Berezovsky, Tom Sturridge is private banker Dimitri Sidorov (based on Mikhail Khodorkovsky), and Alicia Vikander does her best with the uninteresting role of “Ksenia”, a fictionalised girlfriend who leaves Baranov for Sidorov.
