I will start with a personal story. Jokes aside, I do have a certain connection to Olivier Assayas’s film (France, 2025). Last summer, I recorded sound for the film’s extras. At first, it was not entirely clear whether the background actors would speak Russian or “Runglish,” so all scenes were recorded in two versions. In the end, Runglish won out. And that is probably the right choice.
But if we move closer to the point — more precisely, to the plot — here is what I have to say.
First question.
Who is this film for? The film based on the novel of the same name by Giuliano da Empoli (2022) is primarily intended for a foreign audience, and therefore it was impossible to avoid certain clichés about Russia, as well as some deviations from reality. Such a film will certainly not be shown in Russian cinemas, although it can always be found on the internet.
The film is not without a sense of theatricality and convention. For example, as is well known, Yeltsin was missing two fingers on his left hand. But that does not mean the actor had to, say, bandage two fingers or erase them in post-production. A conditional Yeltsin. Yet still resembling the original — both in appearance and in character.
The explosions are also rendered symbolically, as are, for example, the helicopters in which Putin arrives in the North Caucasus at the dawn of his rule. The villa of Berezovsky on the French Riviera is likewise depicted in a highly theatrical manner, when Baranov (Surkov) flies in to see him at the very beginning of the once all-powerful oligarch’s downfall.
Second question.
Who is the film about? On the one hand, the main character is Vadim Baranov, whose prototype is considered to be Vladislav Surkov. During the late Yeltsin and early Putin years, Surkov held the post of deputy head of the Presidential Administration, effectively acting as the Kremlin’s chief curator of domestic policy.
By the way, Putin, played with great precision by Jude Law, appears around the 45th minute of the film. From that moment on, he draws the viewer’s attention to himself. Baranov and Putin seem to exist as if in different dimensions.
Law plays a real Putin, whose recognizability is off the charts in any country in the world. Paul Dano plays a conditional, stylized Surkov. Meanwhile, Surkov’s recognizability has declined significantly even within Russia over the past decade, and as for Western audiences, there is little to say — only Kremlinologists, perhaps, still remember him. Thus, the actors face different tasks: in one case, to reproduce a real person with precision; in the other, to create a composite image. But of whom?
This is where, perhaps, we reach the key point. I would even pronounce the film’s title with a questioning intonation. “The Kremlin Magician?” One could frame the question more broadly. It is as if the director is trying to understand who actually is the Kremlin magician. Or even more radically: is there any magic in the Kremlin at all?
Throughout the film, the creators attempt to answer the question of how a new Russian elite emerged from a post-Soviet punk reality filled with wild parties, excessive drinking, and unrestrained sex among everyone with everyone else. How did it happen that people who, just ten years earlier, were drinking vodka with cheap Soviet champagne suddenly sit over a cup of tea with jam and decide to build a new Russia and demand revenge for the so-called defeat in the Cold War?
This is not about some metaphysical magic of power, but about very real mechanisms. These are the consequences of the social anomie of the 1990s. The French sociologist Émile Durkheim wrote that in conditions of radical transformation of the social order, old norms cease to function while new ones have not yet had time to form. At such moments, people who have lost their former notions of good and evil become capable of anything. Before Durkheim, Dostoevsky had expressed this idea succinctly: “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted.”
As a result, people who grew up under conditions of this very social anomie, once they gain power for natural reasons, carry within them an extreme lack of discrimination in the means they use and create what they lacked in chaos: a rigid vertical of power. This is further compounded by ordinary human ambition. It is no coincidence that one of Putin’s key monologues comes after he is forced to stop and wait for the motorcade of the President of the United States to pass.
However, let us return to the main nominal hero. At the beginning of the film, Baranov (Surkov) appears as a typical wheeler-dealer of the early 2000s, a student and the director of an amateur stage production based on Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We. He then tries his hand at television and finally accepts an offer from Berezovsky, played by Will Keen: “instead of staging plays on stage, to create reality in life.” In effect, Baranov (Surkov) constructs a dystopia out of Russian reality. But does he really construct it?
Once, a driving instructor told me about a simple rule: you should turn the steering wheel in the direction of the skid. This basic principle allows the driver to maintain control of the car.
In political terms, this translates as follows: a process that cannot be stopped should be led. When performing this maneuver, a political actor develops the illusion that, by “leaning to the right,” he will later be able to swing in another, more appealing direction. At the same time, inertia sometimes proves so strong that by leading a particular tilt, the manager (in this case, the deputy head of the Presidential Administration) becomes its hostage and begins to move within a new paradigm, constantly raising the stakes. There is no magic here — just pure physics.
In the first half of the film, Baranov (Surkov) tries to dissuade Putin from launching a new Chechen campaign, then urges him to show some human feeling after the sinking of the Kursk. In the second half, however, the protagonist, seeking to outpace Prigozhin and his “troll factory,” no longer speaks of an alternative Russian truth; instead, by raising the stakes, he demands that the trolls generate continuous informational noise on the internet in order to gain full control over the global network. So where is the magic?
In other words, the conditional Surkov turns the steering wheel into the skid and, realizing (or believing) that he cannot change the inertia of a vast country, tries to move faster than the drift. Yet while retaining his capacity for control, he accelerates the pace of change. He speaks clever words in a quiet, insinuating voice, but the more actively the country slides, the more categorical his formulations become. Does he like this? A good question. Judging by the film, probably not. After all, it is no accident that he wears gloves when meeting bikers in Crimea or when visiting Prigozhin’s troll factory.
In short, what Baranov (Surkov) ends up with is the magic of the Wizard of Oz, who orders everyone to wear glasses. Although no — everyone willingly put the glasses on themselves, and all that remains for the “Kremlin magician” (or dreamer) is to act in accordance with the chosen color. For which he receives “his Oscar.” Perhaps even two.
Today, no jokes. And here is the trailer.