Three years ago a new play by The Crown creator Peter Morgan dramatised the life and times of Boris Berezovsky, the oligarch who plucked Vladimir Putin from the obscurity of St Petersburg where he was deputy mayor, and persuaded him to replace Russia’s then walking heart attack of a president Boris Yeltsin.
The play did well and transferred to the West End. Tom Hollander played Berezovsky and Will Keen was an utterly mesmerising Putin. I liked the show a lot but for the fact that Morgan and presumably director Rupert Goold considered Berezovsky’s Jewishness so key to the plot and characterisation that reminders of his heritage were sewn into the play. This left it eminently possible to conclude that a Jew lay behind not only Putin’s rise but all the bad things that followed, which is the kind of observation that makes it easier to chuck a Molotov cocktail at a Kenton synagogue.
This is an English kind of “unconscious bias” that at its best sees being Jewish as too exotic a thing to be ignored, but which also ends up as a trope, as happened with Royal Court and its Hershel Fink disaster.
What tends not to happen is that a character’s Jewishness is deemed irrelevant to the narrative and is completely ignored. But thankfully this is exactly what has happened in this engrossing if loquacious film directed by the French director Olivier Assayas.
Based on Giuliano da Empoli’s novel it boasts Jude Law in the role of Putin. A remarkable job has been done converting the Hollywood leading man into Russia’s charisma-challenged dictator. The extreme side parting that became the world’s most powerful comb over does a lot of the heavy lifting here. But Law is also very good at conveying the former KGB man’s dead-eyed disinterest in human suffering. This is chillingly visible in a sequence featuring the Kursk submarine disaster during which saving the submariners was far less important to Putin than containing the political damage caused by the accident. From here one can infer that anyone waiting for a flicker of regret in Putin for the million and a half deaths caused by his war in Ukraine will die waiting.
Yet if Assayas had seen Keen’s Putin in Morgan’s play he might have hesitated to cast Law as the Russian president, despite the obvious benefits of the star billing. On stage Keen was simply magnificent in the role. His Putin had a bitter status anxiety for both himself and his country, which informed his demeanour and his decisions. By contrast, Law’s Putin is steely but less coiled with jaw-clenching resentment than Keen’s.
I make the comparison because Keen is coincidentally in Assayas’s film as Berezovsky. He is present in similar events to those seen in Morgan’s play, yet without the need to mention, let alone dwell on, the fact that Berezovsky was a Jew.
Here, events are framed within a fictional device that sees Putin’s mercurial fixer, theatre director-cum-spin doctor Vadim Baranov played by an oddly whispering Paul Dano, interviewed by the film’s American Russophile narrator, played by the always excellent and here rather under-used Jeffrey Wright.
As he is driven to Baranov’s snow-bound home, Wright’s narrator nervously conveys his anxiety about what is about to happen in a way that well describes the tension generated by this film. In Russia things don’t normally turn out bad, he says, but when they do, they turn out really bad.
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