In Venice 82 today was the day of “Il Mago del Kremlin”, one of the most anticipated titles, indeed perhaps the most awaited, for the controversies, the dangers, the opportunities that promised the transposition of the novel by Giuliano di Empoli created by Olivier Assayas. Promises kept in full, this is a very authorial, intelligent and also frightening political film for the truth it contains.

“The wizard of the Kremlin” – The plot

If you are not an expert in Russian politics, the name of Vladislav Surkov will not tell you anything. Over the past thirty years, few men have been more influential than him, few have marked the history of the former Soviet giant more. Giuliano di Empoli was inspired to create the protagonist of his novel, “The Magician of the Kremlin”, who became an official film in Venice 2025, thanks to the wise hand of Olivier Assayas, who is arguing of a first -rate cast and gives us a witty, intimate and gelly disturbing political biopic. Surkov’s alter-ego is called Vadim Baraov (Paul Dano), he dreamed of being a theatrical director, the artist, a modern and sparkling Russia. Then the fate, the ambition, the case and the new political course of his country, made the prophet of political communication, of the strategy, first for the new oligarchs, then for a former KGB agent, who became the politician of the moment: Vladimir Putin (Jude Law). 15 years later, retiring, agrees to meet an American journalist (Jeffrey Wright) and tell him everything he knows.

“Il Mago del Kremlin” is a film with which Assayas mainly caresses the expressive strings of the Costa-Gavras of the 60s and 70s, creates a visually almost television or documentary story, however capable precisely for this distance from the Hollywood and western classic dictates, to be powerful, credible and visceral. The passage is plush, the staging in certain moments almost theatrical, lacks a true physical violence, but abounds on a metaphorical, underground level, while it speaks to us of the collapse of all certainty, of a people who historically democracy has always refused it to follow the strong man for centuries. Paul Dano, perhaps the most underestimated actor of his generation, works masterfully in subtraction to outline a genius, who puts his talent at the service of evil, almost without realizing it. In him there is the metaphor of every youth that from incendiaria then has become conservative every time, but above all of the true power, the invisible one, the one that shapes the world away from the spotlight, adapting to everything and everyone.

A film that only apparently speaks of today’s Russia

“The wizard of the Kremlin” speaks to us of the post-democracy, of this era in which we live, where the West has abdicated totalitarianism capable of joining capitalism, of renewing its soul with mass communication, using the fear and control of it. Jude Law is a convincing Putin, but on which in reality we could stick the face of many, many politicians of this century in which populism is the new God. Alicia Vikander, Tom Sturridge, Will Keen are the other satellites of the story of an invisible life, of a man who outlines the destruction of collective intelligence with the mass media, the unwary disinformation, the constant lowering of the level of the level of the level. global cultural. Stupidity is the sharpest weapon of all, more than the old political propaganda, some of its final form. The chessboard has not changed, the actors and tools have changed, but the search for the privilege of a few remains, the illusion of a freedom that is no longer illusion in Russia.

Assayas’s film connects to Russian philosophy and literatures, which have shaped the world, which indicated the future, with surgical precision and of course they have often been ignored. The reality is that Putin has only arrived before the others, the West has fallen for the inability to be faithful to itself, the present tells us that we will become how Russia is now, indeed it is already happening in the United States, so theoretically different. “The wizard of the Kremlin” reminds us, however, that this process is never automatic or inevitable, it is a virus that is born and also expands with the help of men. Faithful in Nietzsche, to his individual determinism, the handwritten film is realistic more than pessimist tout court, it is the lucid analysis of an impasse of which Baraov is the architect and together. Egoism is its great sin, making itself against too late that redemption is only a good chimera for artists, not for men of power. An important, complex film, behind the fiction patina, there is the truth we know, we have always known but that we do not face, because courage is no longer than this time, of this world.

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