From these days, Russia has returned to occupy a large space in everyone’s mind. Olivier Assayas takes the bull for horns and decides to tell us by adapting the novel by Giuliano Da Empoli, helped nothing less than by Emmanuel Carrère. The Kremlin wizard has been at the cinema since February 12, but be careful: going to the room with the wrong expectations could make us lose what he is really doing.
Il mago del Cremlino: ascesa nella nuova Russia.
Vadim Baronov is a figure wrapped in mystery. Grey eminence of Russian politics over the last thirty years, is a figure of seemingly unlimited power and at the same time almost alien to the dynamics of the Kremlin palace. Now retired, Baronov invites in his country dacha an American academic sagace with which he traces the steps of his personal and professional life. From the latest twins of the Soviet Union to its beginnings as a theatrical director just after the collapse, passing through a career in reality TV that introduces it to the most intoxicating and dirty show of all: politics. With the support of the oligarch Boris Berezovskij, Vadim will be an instrumental figure behind the rise of the new “zar”: Vladimir Putin.
Cinema a chiave
We are clear: Vadim Baronov never existed. It is true that it is partially inspired by the figure of Vladislav Surkov, also he spindoctor and councilman of Putin, but this is not the point. The film, like the novel to which it is inspired, works precisely because Baronov is a fictional character. Its being at the same time a chameleon and a fish fuor of water allow it to be drawn between a surprisingly wide range of events and real characters (from the Kursk disaster to the Soči Olympics, from Prigožin to Limonov), periodically launching in its lucid and detached analyses without being out of place.
Il mago del Cremlino, noi e la storia
Contrary to what was suggested by much of the advertising material and the Italian subtitle, the Kremlin Wizard is not even a film about Putin. Its only true protagonist is Russia, or rather, the political and cultural arch of Russia post-Soviet union. The “great men” that the film puts before us are just headlights, reflectors to illuminate a truth: the fact that all the pages of history, even the most foolish and the most deaf, are the product of complex and sedimentary processes, in which the only protagonist is the indefinite and at the same time omnipotent social body. In this perspective The magician of the Kremlin is a rich but always chewable film, transported beyond the finish line by excellent performances, among which stands a always magnetic Paul Dano.
Il cast
Paul Dano is Vadim Baronov, an intellectual shy but guided by a deep lucidity and unparalleled unfairness. Jude Law is Vladimir Putin, a bureaucratic grey of the SBB chosen to be the face of a new Russia. Alicia Vikander interprets Ksenija, great love of Baronov, while Tom Sturridge is Dmitri Sidorov, a charismatic friend of the magician who most of all takes advantage of the newborn oligarchy. Finally, Jeffrey Wright plays Lawrence Rowland, an academic on a research trip to Russia whose acumen activates Baronov’s attention.
L’articolo The magician of the Kremlin is (excellent) historical fiction – The review comes from Dituttounpop.it.
