Riga “poses” for the Moscow of the 1990s, where men decide in closed rooms who would be the most suitable successor to Boris Yeltsin, the Russian president who was in poor health at the time. Vladimir Putin comes to power, and we already know what’s next; the only question that remains is what interpretation of the story about Russia and its return to totalitarianism is chosen by the director of the film “The Wizard of the Kremlin“, the well-known French classic Olivier Assayas, shot in Riga?
The Western Europeans’ understanding of the socio-political situation in Eastern Europe and its complex historical twists and turns can sometimes combine two paradoxical features – a firm belief in their knowledge and an absolute lack of it. They are conspicuously present in French director Olivier Assayas’ latest film “The Wizard of the Kremlin”, which is an adaptation of the work of the Italian writer Giuliano da Empoli.
The film relies heavily on the message of da Empoli’s novel, maintaining its free approach to the interpretation of various facts. In the center of the events, we see a Western journalist who has come to Russia to study the work of writer Yevgeniy Zamyatin, the inspiration of George Orwell’s novel “1984”, but ends up having a private audience with a man named Vadim Baranov; he is the protagonist of both Empoli’s book and Assayas’ film, and is almost the only character whose real name is not used in the film.
The prototype of “Vadja” Baranov, played by the American actor Paul Dano, is the political technologist Vladislav Surkov, known as the “Grey Cardinal of the Kremlin”. The others – the dictator Vladimir Putin (at that time still the director of the Russian Federal Security Service), Alexei Prigozhin (Andris Keish), as well as the oligarch Boris Berezovsky (Will Keane) and the leader of the motorcycle group “Night Wolves” Alexander Zaldostanov (Kaspar Kambala) – are called by their real names. It is true that Putin is more often referred to as “tsar”.
Hollywood stars and narratives about Russia courtesy of Forma Pro
Table of Contents
The message Assayas weaves into the film’s screenplay with his co-writer, French writer Emmanuel Carrère (advised by da Empoli himself), is the most problematic part of the film.
As a digression, one of the best-known stops in Karer’s literary career is the biographical novel “Limonov”, loosely based on the self-reflections of the Russian politician. Both novels – both “Kremlia burvi” written by da Empoli and “Limonov” by Carrera – are united by the blending of reality with fiction and the authors’ claims to a deep understanding of Russia’s socio-political processes. As an additional exception, the story of “Limonov” has also been immortalized in cinema: the film “Limonov: The Ballad of Eddie” (2024) was shot by Kirill Serebrennikov. This film, similar to “The Wizard of the Kremlin”, was shot in Latvia under the auspices of the “Forma Pro” studio.
It is interesting that the name of the studio “Forma Pro” appears not only in connection with bringing Hollywood talents to Latvia, but now relatively regularly participating in films with narratives about Russia.
The films “Limonov” and “The Wizard of the Kremlin” are also followed by another work – Catalan director Albert Serra’s film “Out of This World” (the title of which could be translated as “Out of this world” in Latvian), it tells about the “eternal rivalry between the USA and Russia” and “efforts to resolve the economic conflict caused by sanctions during the Ukrainian war”. The shooting of the film, of course, took place in Latvia, while the director claims in interviews that this “will not be a political, but rather an economic film, a farce”.
Returning to the message of the film “The Magician of the Kremlin”, it not only shows a lack of understanding of Russia’s political situation and its development after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but also echoes the Kremlin’s narratives: namely, that the attitude and policies of the West, especially the United States, are to blame for the current political climate in Russia and beyond.
So, for example, when Vadim Baranov claims in one of the conversations that the Maidan uprising in Ukraine was orchestrated by the USA and specifically by the CIA, these claims are not refuted in the film’s script.
The film focuses on power grabbers
In the course of the film, we see Baranov’s growth: he – a young intelligentsia – from the underground gangs comes to theater directing, but later – as he says – he changes his “horse carriage to a Lamborghini” and starts working on television.
On television, he learns how to create stories that appeal to the public and are intriguing. Vadja’s talent is soon also appreciated in the “higher shelves” – he is noticed by oligarch Boriss Berezovsky. True, Baranov’s motivation in the film is not clear – despite the fact that he came from an intelligent family that well understood the lies of the Soviet regime, he too, like his father and grandfather, ultimately decides to serve the nomenclature. “If you don’t seize power, it will seize you,” is the principle by which Baranov is guided.
a shot from the movie “The Wizard of the Kremlin”
Photo: Publicity image
But even knowing the reality of Russia, it is hard to imagine how being a political technologist of a murderous dictator is the only way to survive. In addition, the film shows that Baranov registers Putin’s true nature, his eagerness to seize power and settle accounts with political rivals, very early on. However, he submissively continues to serve, because this is the reality, and he cannot do otherwise (?). We can say that this adherence to Putin is driven by personal ambitions and lust for power, but the film hardly pays attention to it, if only to let us remotely understand that this comes from an inferiority complex rooted in competition for a woman.
The inevitability of violence and who is to blame for it?
The depiction of political processes in the film is, to put it mildly, populist. Moreover, more amenable to the Kremlin’s narratives.
In Assayas’s film, there are both accusations against Gorbachev as the destroyer of the USSR, and judgments about the fact that the people of Russia need verticality of power.
“Russia has always been forged with an axe,” claim the characters of the film, therefore, the concentration of power in one hand and the violence used to seize and hold power is like an inevitable necessity – let me paraphrase – therefore, normality.
Here, too, we see the oligarchs as the evil exploiters of Russia, while there is silence about Putin’s own ambitions. The years after independence are described as a time when democracy (not criminal exploitation of resources) made the nation poor, and if the country used to be a “motherland”, now it is a “supermarket”.
The most toothless lines are dedicated to the war in Chechnya – the film finds time to reproduce the dictator Putin’s infamous saying about settling down with opponents in the toilet, but does not devote much more reflection to this topic, moreover, leaving a smiling ellipsis when it comes to terrorist attacks in Moscow apartment buildings. When asked if these explosions were orchestrated by the authorities (Putin), Baranov’s face crept into a faint smile.
It is this scene that creates the most disturbing feeling, because to talk like this about the events and the war, which have claimed the lives of so many people, is amazingly ignorant: it seems that the director has completely forgotten at this point that these are not just dry facts or some intellectualized political discourses, but real events with very real victims.
Parallels can be drawn here with crime dramas about serial killers, where the antagonist’s lack of human values is the center of gravity of the message, but clear condemnation does not follow. There aren’t really any contrasts in the film – everything happens in the “gray zone”. Yes, in “The Wizard of the Kremlin” we see Putin seizing power, murdering, but all this is presented as a kind of inevitability – because Russia is a place where it is normal – the strongest takes power and rules as he wants.
a shot from the movie “The Wizard of the Kremlin”
Photo: Publicity image
“The Wizard of the Kremlin” is not presented as a true or documentary review of events; the movie even has credits warning that all the characters and what they say are fictional, however it’s hard to take it that way since most of the characters have real-life prototypes (even with the same names). Thus, after watching the film, the viewer is left with some basic theses: there is no single culprit (aggressor) in the events in Ukraine, but Putin’s policy results from the interaction of violence normalized in Russia and the guilt of the West.
These theses skilfully blur the line between fiction and reality, trying to interpret the current geopolitical situation as ambiguous; and here it is impossible not to see the benefits of Russia’s policy.
The narrative of ambiguity is widely used in propaganda messages to divide the European public’s perception of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and to slow aid.
Pressure on Latvia
Assayas himself has denied any cooperation with Russia, including in the context of financing the film. But the film itself, due to its message, in the conditions of today’s information war, cannot be perceived as simply mediocre Western European cinema, which with morbid curiosity tries to look behind the scenes of Russian power.
Meanwhile, in a study published in the French edition of “Le Monde” (and republished in the weekly edition of “Ir”), Ukrainian investigative journalist Anna Koryagina pointed out the uncertainty about the sources of funding for the production of the film. Her publication “Kremļa burvja” nedienas in Latvia” (The Mischief of the Kremlin Wizard in Latvia) focuses on the origin of the novel and the film, the authors’ incomplete knowledge of Russia, as well as the co-owners of the Latvian studio “Forma Pro” in Russia, and the circumstances why the filming of the film in our country did not receive the support of the Latvian Investment and Development Agency (LIAA).
As mentioned in the article, the Latvian side did not support the shooting of “The Wizard of the Kremlin” in Riga, justifying it with threats to national security, but this did not prevent the director of the film, when meeting with the audience in Paris, to interpret this decision as rooted in fear of Russian backlash, which does not correspond to the truth.
As Koryagina writes, the decision not to financially support the shooting of the film met with great institutional resistance from the “Gaumont” studio, which also attracted the French cinema center to exert pressure on Latvia. The French side insisted that the film had no political goals, and that Latvia’s actions were limiting creative freedom.
To think that the film does not have a political message is not only naive, but also false – any work that seeks to reflect current political figures, events rooted in reality, the consequences of which affect the way we live today, cannot be viewed detached from reality.
And any interpretation is an expression of a position or opinion – it’s hard to imagine a filmmaker who creates the message of a film – mostly years of work – “accidentally”. Moreover, Olivier Assayas is not a pioneer in the creation of cinema narratives, rather a classic, whose filmography includes such lively messages about cinema as, for example, “Irma Vep” (1996) and “Blue Maria Clouds” (2014).
Participation of Latvian actors and ethical contradictions
The Latvian side’s evaluation of the purposes of cultural policy for which our state funds are used is a rational and dignified decision.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about the large number of Latvian actors who appear in the film. It must be said right away that playing anti-heroes can be very engaging from an acting point of view – it is a wide bridgehead of possibilities. However, this is not the case with this film, because in the film the characters are more like superficial vignettes whose only task is to repeat the sometimes odious statements of their characters.
This is especially true of Aleksandr Zaldostanov, the motorcyclist and Putin propagandist played by Kaspar Kambala; The character played by Kambala calls the anti-Latvian Eduard Limonov a visionary. Likewise, Andras Keish’s episodic appearance in the character of Evgenii Prigozhin, the former leader of the mercenary group “Wagner” and known as the “Kremlin cook”, does not reach any heights of acting.
Embracing the characters cannot therefore be viewed as a professional challenge that would outweigh the ethical contradictions of participating in the project of the relevant message.
In conclusion, the French political scientist and Russian expert Cécile Vaissié should be quoted, who published an article on the “Desk Russie” portal on December 1, 2022 about da Empoli’s novel and its problematic duality: “Of course, all this would not matter much – in France there is no shortage of “novels” that create and maintain a false image of Russia – unless there was a cruel war going on right now, if Russians weren’t being killed every day Ukrainians; if this war, while destroying many illusions and appearances, did not also reveal the absolute inability of Russian society to restore and strengthen its identity and values during the last decades – a concept that Vladimir Putin often manipulates… In this context
Uncritical adoption of the statements of ideologues is more than inadequate: it is dangerous because it helps to strengthen the Kremlin’s propaganda.”
This statement can also be accurately applied to Olivier Assayas’s film.
date:2026-02-10 14:32:00
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