Following up one of his smallest-scale films, Suspended Time, Olivier Assayas’ latest is the epic political drama The Wizard of the Kremlin, based on Giuliano da Empoli. Starring Jude Law as Vladimir Putin alongside Paul Dano, Alicia Vikander, Tom Sturridge, Will Keen, and Jeffrey Wright, the Venice selection was picked up by Vertical for a May 15 release, and now the first trailer has arrived.
Here’s the synopsis: “In the chaos of post-Soviet Russia, rising KGB officer Vladimir Putin (Jude Law) joins forces with master manipulator Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano) to reshape life behind the Iron Curtain, using violence and deception to change the world forever. Putin and Baranov’s reign of chaos begins with lies and corruption, and quickly escalates to assassinations, tyranny, and eventually all-out war.”
Savina Petkova said in her Venice review, “Audiences resisted Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice because they feared the idea of Donald Trump being a movie’s protagonist, but never in its runtime does The Wizard of Kremlin show any ambivalence towards its main character. Without daring to question Baranov as a narrator, Assayas’ film consents to be interpreted as cynical. Because what is it, if not cynical, to insist on turning a chain of events that are still unfolding into a compact story? We may be used to recognizing films that fetishize something through their form, but we seemingly need to be wary of a content-fetish too.”
See the trailer below, along with a recent conversation from Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, while Nick Newman’s conversation with Assayas touching on Kremlin is here.