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Sometimes life disappoints you in interesting ways. I hated Giuliano da Empoli\u2019s 2022 book The Wizard of the Kremlin<\/em>, a fictional political thriller about the dawn of Putinism, with a shuddering passion. I had, therefore, been looking forward to despising the film version when it arrived in cinemas last month, too.\u00a0<\/p>\n Yet it turns out that TWotK<\/em>, directed and co-written by French filmmaker Olivier Assayas, is an impressive film: visually stunning, well cast, a straight story well told. Paul Dano (the greasy-faced young preacher from There Will Be Blood<\/em>) plays Vadim Baranov, the fictional \u2018Wizard\u2019 of the title, a whizkid theatre and TV executive tasked with creating and curating a successor to the ailing Boris Yeltsin. Will Keen (the Queen\u2019s painfully tactful private secretary from The Crown<\/em>) is brilliantly cast as Boris Berezovsky, the oligarch mastermind who talent-spots Vladimir Putin and believes (very wrongly) that he is placing an obedient puppet on the throne. And Jude Law proves once again that the real test of a great actor is playing someone other than themselves as he deadpans a daring performance as President Putin himself.\u00a0<\/p>\n The narrative, closely based on the original novel, is framed as a story within a story. An American academic (played by Jeffrey Wright) who has written about the career of the mysterious Baranov arrives in Moscow for a sabbatical of literary research. He is contacted by an anonymous fan who asks to meet. The American is picked up in a black Mercedes and driven to a remote wooded dacha<\/em> owned by you-guessed-who where Baranov recounts his rollercoaster life story as the architect and facilitator of Putinism in all its awfulness. What follows is a tick-tock of the epochal events of Russian politics from the roaring 90s through to the annexation of Crimea in 2014 \u2013 all calmly related in Dano\u2019s whispering, confiding monotone.\u00a0<\/p>\n While Baranov himself is a fictional character (albeit one modelled on spin doctor Vladislav Surkov), other parts of the film wear their inspiration more obviously. Some viewers may find themselves asking why we are watching what amounts to a two-and-a-half hour biopic about modern Russian history. Perhaps because I witnessed these dramatic years first-hand, I found it a fascinating resurrection of a lost era. In the tradition of Bohemian Rhapsody<\/em> or Elvis<\/em>, casting dead ringers as real historical personalities is uncanny. Will Keen, though he doesn\u2019t resemble Berezovsky physically, catches the scheming oligarch\u2019s beetling intensity perfectly. Magne-Havard Brekke brilliantly channels the strutting arrogance and cynicism of the ultranationalist writer Eduard Limonov. Jude Law\u2019s pouting, brooding turn as Putin may not be his greatest performance, but it is certainly a great impression.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n