NZIFF Review: The Wizard of the Kremlin

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Written by Trevor Pronoso |  Letterboxd: @CleverGurl | Instagram: @trev.pro | Contributing Writer

The Wizard of the Kremlin

dir. Olivier Assayas

France/UK/USA, 145 mins

Olivier Assayas is a known admirer of Guy Debord, which—despite my not having seen many Assayas films—allows me to make the fair assertion that The Wizard of the Kremlin is a work of détournement (he'd probably let film writers like me make such comparisons before he does), albeit one that Assayas stresses to be obsolete in the 21st century. Specifically, it's been a while since I've endured a film that insists on its internal anti-capitalistic subversion of cinematic codes, whilst flourishing in its mode of capitalist communication (Assayas being a staple in the 'international cinema' market, the involvement of Disney+ in its distribution)

Take, for example, the cinematography: everything is shot exclusively from the waist up or in close-up. The film is shot with an ALEXA 35 digital camera on a gimbal that constantly glides and pans through the lavish rooms of mansions and beachside villas owned by political oligarchs like an excited tourist; you see both nothing and everything. On the other hand, every sentence uttered by the characters reeks of either irony-poisoned, satirical declarations of their moral antipathy (merely a response to changing political climates, they justify), or winded exhaustions and mournings of a more sentimental, sincere, and idyllic past in the wake of the paradoxically chaotic milieu of the Soviet Union's dissolution. "Everything changed when the (American) Fire Nation attacked"-type beat.

Assayas is a 'post-leftist' filmmaker in the sense that what he 'sees' and what he 'hears' will never reconcile or politically synthesise to an alternative, more radical framework than the ones that have since failed. For him, by way of Deleuze, the deterritorialising and liberating of politics and cinema after May '68—and certainly after the Soviet Union—have also simultaneously engendered their own process of re-territorialising new national identities (today's Russian Federation), albeit right into the hands of today's global hegemon, neoliberalism. This is why it's difficult for me to take Assayas seriously; he genuinely believes the world and the people responsible for this systemic death spiral towards capital will never take this crisis seriously until it's too late. To crib Nick Land, Assayas is really just accelerating the nihilistic auto-productive slaughterhouse by subsuming its own destruction as an aesthetic. The result? The idea of an 'arthouse film' on Disney+.