A look behind the Kremlin's walls

  It's easy to see why director Olivier Assayas may have been drawn to Giuliano Da Empoli's novel about the machinations behind Vladimir Putin's rise to power in post-Soviet Russia. We seem to relish behind-the-scenes looks at powerful institutions, perhaps hoping that we'll enjoy the contradictory pleasures of savoring and condemning the rot we find.

  Employing a strong cast led by Paul Dano, as Vadim Baranov, a master manipulator who becomes a backstage force in Putin's career, Assayas presents a highlight reel of Russian history from the 1980s to the invasion of Crimea. 

    Assayas unifies the movie's various segments with a narration by Baranov, who meets at his country home with a visiting Yale professor (a wasted Jeffrey Wright) to whom he tells his story, a framing device that weighs the movie down.

   Shifting focus and locations, Assayas introduces various important characters in the story, notably Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen), an oligarch who identifies Putin as a successor to the increasingly ineffectual and doddering Boris Yeltsin. Berezovski mistakenly thinks Putin can be controlled.

   It takes awhile for him to appear, but Jude Law's Putin turns out to be a powerful addition to the movie. Compact, brutal and cunning, Putin's forceful presence can be felt even when he's off screen.  

   Working from a screenplay by Emmanuel Carrere, Assayas finds youthful energy in the wild days just after the fall of the Soviet Union. At this point, Baranov is a young theater student who samples the libertine freedoms of the 80s and 90s. 

    Baranov's theatrical background proves critical to his advancement; he's assigned the role of creating the illusory reality around Putin. He becomes skilled in the use of TV and eventually the internet. He's a master manipulator who operates without conscience, a technician who wants to be part of the action.

    Looking back on Dano's performance as Baranov, it's understandable that he chose to play this schemer with a low-key whispery voice. Baranov isn't a man of conviction; he's a man of prowess. Still, Dano's choice can feel a bit undercooked, and the characters surrounding Baranov can be more interesting than he, a problem the movie can't always overcome. 

     Early on, Baranov is smitten by a young woman (Alicia Vikander) who will crop up throughout in relationships with various characters, including a flamboyant, budding oligarch (Tom Sturridge) who lures her away from Baranov.

     Some of the actors are playing real people; others -- including Dano -- portray fictionalized characters. Baranov reportedly is based on Vladislav Surkov, a former Putin confidant and advisor. I'm always a bit wary of movies that mix the real and the fictional, especially when dealing with people who are still alive.

    Many of the actors employ Russian accents; others (including Dano) don't, but Assayas deserves credit for creating the impression that we're watching Russian characters in a complex drama with moving  parts that collide and abrade, often in ways that create an intriguing picture of undisguised deceit and corruption.

    For all that, The Wizard can't quite live up to the magnitude of its subject. At 136 minutes, The Wizard of the Kremlin harbors a surfeit of betrayals and power moves, but the movie also comes across as a crowded, novelistic effort that's not without interest,  but too frequently gets lost in the weeds.

 

Bob's Cinema Diary 6/23/20: 'Babyteeth,' 'Wasp Network,' 'Daddy Issues'

Babyteeth 

Talk about a parental nightmare. Your 16-year-old daughter falls for a 23-year-old drug user without a home. He's tattooed, sports a mullet, and doesn't seem to give a damn about anything. His name is Moses. That's the set-up for director Shannon Murphy's Babyteeth. But wait. There's more. Milla (Eliza Scanlen), the teenager in question, is no ordinary kid. She's got terminal cancer. So Milla's parents (Essie Davis and Ben Mendelsohn) face a problem. How do you say "no" to a kid who can't ruin her future because she doesn't have one?  Another teenage weepy about a kid with a terminal disease? Not exactly. Working from a screenplay by Rita Kalnejais, Murphy adds whimsical stylistic flourishes and enough emotional realism to upset expectations. A pianist who abandoned her musical career, Mom is about to drown in deep emotional waters. A psychiatrist by trade, Dad is so overcome with trepidation about what looms that at one point he gives himself a shot of morphine. Parental performances are strong but the movie belongs to Scanlen and Toby Wallace.  Wallace gives Moses lots of rough appeal. You never doubt that a good kid lurks beneath Moses' bad-kid surface. Babyteeth is the kind of movie you might approach with dread, but one that turns out to be more creative than you initially might have imagined. None of the characters want to be boxed-in by cliche. If Scanlen's name rings a bell, it might be because she played Beth in Little Women, one of last year's best-received movies.

Wasp Network

If you're looking for a good movie by director Olivier Assayas, you might want to try 2005's Summer Hours. I wish the same could be said for Assay's latest, Wasp Network, now showing on Netflix. Having already teamed with Assayas in 2010's Carlos, Edgar Ramirez plays a Cuban who in the 1990s leaves his wife (Penelope Cruz) and daughter to defect to the US. As we later learn, Ramirez's Rene Gonzalez is part of a Castro-conceived program to infiltrate Miami Cuban circles that carry out oppositional activities against the regime. A muddled narrative brings the so-called Wasp Network program to light, introducing two additional characters. Gael Garcia Bernal portrays team leader Gerardo Hernandez and Wagner Moura portrays a slick operative who takes a Cuban-American wife (Ana de Armas). Assayas seems to be aiming for epic scope, but can't put the pieces of the movie together in a way that staves off confusion. Although she doesn't get as much screen time as the men, Cruz makes a strong impression as a woman wounded by her husband's defection and betrayed by the revolution she avidly supports. The same goes for de Armas, another woman whose life becomes collateral damage as the plot unfolds. The performances are all strong, some of its scenes connect and the movie looks great, but Wasp Network registers as a misfire from a fine director and an extremely good cast.

Daddy Issues
Henrietta (Kimberley Datnow) moves from London to Los Angeles when she's summoned to join the board of her late father's firm. It seems that Henrietta -- who aspires to be a stand-up comic -- once lived with her dad and attended school in LA. That’s convenient because Henrietta has friends from back in the day, which means the movie has a supporting cast. Alice (Alice Carroll Johnson), one of Henrietta’s old pals, tries to convince a small group of reunited friends that she's a successful talent agent. In reality, she's a gay woman trying to make ends meet by providing non-sexual companionship for a benevolent Sugar Daddy who misses his late wife and only seems to want someone with whom he can watch TV. When Henrietta moves into her father's LA house, she learns that Nolan (Tanner Rittenhouse) also lives there. He works for dad's company and developed a relationship in which Dad became a kind of mentor. Henrietta's attempt to reunite with an old boyfriend goes nowhere. Director Laura Holliday never convinced me to care about any of this or to believe that Henrietta had real comedy chops. That would have been fine had Daddy Issues been a movie about the difference between wanting to do stand-up and actually pulling it off. Somewhere, there’s a movie here, but no one seems to have found it.

Watching inhabitants of the publishing world

Non-Fiction examines life within a narrow yet revealing frame.

About a quarter of the way through director Olivier Assayas‘s Non-Fiction, my wife turned to me and whispered, "I can't stand these people." Her abhorrence seemed entirely justified.

Assayas's dive into the besieged world of book publishing -- complete with copious conversations about the digital onslaught that threatens the literary soul -- focuses on narcissistic intellectuals who have affairs as casually as the rest of us might have lunch and who seem to hide behind veils of self-assured posturing. Among this group, it's not easy to separate conviction from self-interest.

And yet...

There's an undeniable sense of life in Non-Fiction along with fine performances in a story that begins when the editor of a publishing house (Guillaume Canet) rejects the work of one of his authors (Vincent Macaigne).

Assayas then opens the world he wishes to explore, allowing his characters to become more stressed and more revealed.

Canet's Alain is married to an actress (Juliette Binoche) who has been working in a popular television crime series. Macaigne's Leonard's wife, Valerie (Nora Hamzawi), has committed herself to politics, working for a left-leaning politician. She responds cruelly when Leonard sinks into depression.

She approaches life with staunch practicality that leaves little room for compassion toward those around her and also differentiates her from a crowd that's likely to spend hours talking about e-books, the impact of digital media, the way we perceive the world, and whether blogs are worthy of attention from literary-minded readers.

Leonard's so-called "auto-fiction" comes under fire. Does it exploit the lives of those with whom he associates, particularly the women with whom he's had affairs? And, yes, bed-hopping may have something to do with various decisions that are made. We begin to suspect pettiness lies beneath what sometimes are expressed as matters of principle.

I couldn't begin to tell you whether Assayas cares a fig about the way the digital world seems to be gobbling up everything, changing long-standing practices and assumptions. And I'm not entirely sure these verbally dexterous characters are doing anything more than engaging in a rarefied form of shop talk about the business they happen to inhabit.

Even-keeled Alain has an affair with a young woman (Christa Theret) who has been hired to help shove his company into the digital age and who seems to be a model for some new kind of human being. She’s a pillar of technical pragmatism.

Binoche's character worries that her TV work amounts to a betrayal of her artistry. Leonard doesn't seem entirely convinced of his talent, admitting that he can't write without pillaging his own life and the lives of those who happened to wander into it.

Only Hamzawi's Valeria seems to have her feet on the ground, but you wouldn't want to take her as a role model either.

So what's the takeaway from all this? I'd say the movie has something to do with exposing the narrowness of preoccupied lives. It's not the digital world that threatens Assayas's characters; it's their insistence on using their considerable intellectual skills to create the illusion that they might actually know what they're doing.

So, like my wife, you may not like these folks, but also like her, you’ll probably stay interested in this astutely cut slice of Parisian life.

I didn't buy 'Personal Shopper'

Kristin Stewart reunites with director Olivier Assayas for a ghost story.

Director Olivier Assayas worked with Kristen Stewart in the well-received Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), the story of a young woman working as a personal assistant to a famous actress (Juliette Binoche). Now, Assayas has reunited with Stewart for Personal Shopper, a movie that does its best to defy description.

Assayas tries to combine various genre elements, most notably those of a ghost story, those of a philosophical thriller and those pertaining to the portrait of a grief-stricken character at loose ends.

Stewart's Maureen is haunted by grief after the death of her twin brother, Lewis, a young man with whom she shared a heart defect and with whom she made a pact. Brother and sister agreed that whoever died first would contact the other from the great beyond. We're told that both Maureen and her brother were mediums.

Stewart's Maureen lives in Paris where she works as a personal shopper for an apparently famous model (Nora von Waldstatten). Maureen, who doesn't seem to fit into Paris or perhaps into any known surroundings, travels around the city on her motor scooter. She's looking for items that might please her mostly unappreciative boss.

Sometimes, Maureen tries on her boss' clothes, something she's not supposed to do. Assayas treats these clothes-swapping incidents as if Maureen's violating a taboo, reinforcing the idea by having Maureen masturbate in her absent boss's bed.

Maureen also spends time at the house where her brother passed away. She encounters various noises, but not getting a clear message from the next world, although Assays shows us a computer generated shimmer that we assume is the late Lewis's ghost.

Once in a while, Maureen Skypes with her boyfriend (Ty Olwin), a young man who's working in cybersecurity in London.

More importantly, she begins receiving text messages (well-handled by Assayas over the course of 20 minutes) from an unidentified man who seems to know her every move. The ghost? A stalker? Someone menacing? Someone helpful?

Stewart plays an unhappy 27-year-old woman of frustratingly spare expression. That makes her a perfect match for Assayas's maddeningly spare approach. He's big on showing us glossy interiors, but doesn't seem all that interested in human interiors.

Say this, though, Stewart manages to look entirely of the moment even when her character is bored.

Assayas steadfastly refuses to define his movie, which isn't made any clearer by the addition of a brutal murder. You can take all this as irritatingly or provocatively French, depending on your taste.

I don't mind ambiguity, but there's a difference between ambiguity and vagueness. For me, Personal Shopper blurred the line. Put another way: Personal Shopper feels arty and pretentious, but left me unsure about what its pretensions even were.

Life is tough -- even for stars

Clouds of Sils Maria examines the woes of an aging actress.

There are two important characters in Clouds of Sils Maria -- and only one of them is human.

The latest collaboration between director Olivier Assayas and actress Juliette Binoche revolves around an aging actress who's being pushed from center stage. She's the obvious human in this drama.

Then there's the other character: time, a relentless accumulation of years that's pushing the actress out of the spotlight.

Binoche plays Maria, an accomplished middle-aged French actress who spends most of the movie in the company of her impressively efficient assistant (Kristen Stewart).

In addition to handling Maria's affairs -- everything from an impending divorce hearing to press requests -- Stewart's Valentine also interprets an increasingly youth-oriented culture for a skeptical Maria.

The movie opens on a train with Maria and Valentine headed for a tribute to the director who launched Maria's career. In the midst of the trip, they learn that the director has passed away, turning the pending tribute into a sad affair.

At what was to be a celebration, Maria meets an actor with whom she once had an affair, but on whom she has soured. The movie then slips away to Switzerland, where Maria and Valentine ensconce themselves in a mountain home owned by the late director's wife.

Clouds of Sils Maria has backstage allure. Assayas takes us into Maria's private world. She's capable of putting on good front, but her laugh reveals a bit of desperation, as well as the wear of too many cigarettes.

Despite various digressions, Clouds revolves around a single event. A hot-shot director (Lars Eidinger) offers Maria a part in a stage production of The Maloja Snake, the movie that established her career.

This time, though, Maria must play the older of two women engaged in a love relationship that falls apart as the younger woman becomes increasingly assertive.

The more incendiary role has gone to Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloe Grace Moritz), a youthful actress who can't seem to keep her face out of the tabloids. Jo-Ann, who has appeared in sci-fi blockbusters, is either a Hollywood A-lister or about to become one.

Stewart's character occupies a middle ground between Maria and her youthful challenger. She respects Maria, but appreciates Jo-Ann's gift, an admiration that's revealed when Maria and Valentine go to a theater to watch one of Jo-Ann's 3D, sci-fi extravaganzas.

When Maria and Valentine run lines from the upcoming play, it becomes clear that they're also acting out portions of their complex relationship, sometimes in ways that seem too on-the-nose.

It may help to know that the movie has an insider component: Binoche and Assayas worked together on Rendez-vous (1985), an Andre Techine-directed movie that Assayas co-wrote and which helped bring Binoche to prominence. They also teamed for 2008's Summer Hours.

After her fine work in the Alzheimer's drama Still Alice, Stewart continues to impress. She plays the least defined and, therefore, most interesting of the three women.

Assays is no speed demon when it comes to pacing, and he isn't exactly breaking new ground here. Clouds sometimes seems to be drifting, and the insular world of these performers can narrow to the point of off-putting self-absorption.

It's also not clear why Assayas made Binoche, who's 51, into a 40-year-old for his movie. Perhaps he wanted to emphasize that show business so values newness and youth that 40 is considered old for an actress.

As for Maria and Jo-Ann, they're jockeying for position -- not only with each other -- but, in Maria's case, with the inevitability of advancing time. Her tragedy, one supposes, is that she's smart enough to know that she's not going to beat the clock.

Young, radical and French, circa 1970

There's something inherently absurd about watching privileged French high school students arguing about whether they should be Maoists or Trotskyites. But such are the questions debated by some of the characters in director Olivier Assayas's Something in the Air, an appropriately discursive look at radical student life in France during the years following the student revolutions of 1968. Story is not Assayas's strong suit; his strengths have more to do with the way in which he recreates a moment that seems to have history-making momentum, but which (as we know) ultimately fizzled. The story revolves around Gilles (Clement Metayer), a young man at loose ends. One minute, he's throwing Molotov cocktails at his school; the next, he's mooning over a girlfriend (Carole Combes) who won't commit. Gilles's father works in movies, and it's clear that a path in film is open for the young man if he decides to focus on cinema. Gilles may do just that, once he gets over some of the political and romantic turmoil in his unformed life. Christine (Lola Creton), another of Gilles's romantic interests, wants to devote her life to making Marxist films. We also meet Alain (Felix Armand), a student who aspires to be a writer and who has taken up with an American girl (India Salvor Menuez). There's something loose and insubstantial about all these relationships, a sense of youthful transiency. Assayas -- who directed Carlos, the remarkable three-part series about Venezuelan revolutionary Ilich Ramírez Sánchez -- never imposes a compelling structure on a movie that ultimately needs one. Still, insights accumulate as the story unfolds. Although these kids fancy themselves as revolutionaries, it's never entirely clear what grieves them. And you can't shake the sense that just about everyone in the movie will "mature'' into lives in which they're amply rewarded by the system they so vehemently oppose. Not entirely satisfying and often frustrating, Something in the Air, nonetheless, brings a fleeting, youthful moment to life without sentimentalizing or lionizing the people who lived through it.

Guns, money and maybe politics

Director Olivier Assayas' 5 1/2-hour Carlos proves totally absorbing, an inside view of a terrorist's world.

Quick tell me, who is Ilich Ramírez Sánchez?

I'm betting you don't remember that the man with this Russian-influenced name became known as Carlos, the Jackal, the Venezuelan-born terrorist who is now serving a life sentence in France for a triple murder. Carlos' violent accomplishments supposedly extended to 80 or so deaths during a 25-year span that found him working in Africa, the Middle East and Europe.

Before watching the movie, I took a quick refresher course on Carlos via some Internet browsing. Early on, Carlos plied his violent trade for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). He led a 1975 raid on the Vienna headquarters of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Three people were killed during that operation.

After that, Carlos became a free-lance revolutionary, working for various governments who were interested in the kind of services that he provided. He viewed himself as a revolutionary; his employers may have seen him as a political hit man.

According to Carlos -- the absorbing 5 1/2-hour film by French director Olivier Assayas -- Carlos wasn't easy to know. Rendered in a truly extraordinary performance by the Venezuelan actor Edgar Ramirez, Carlos seems a man of great carnal appetites. He smoked and drank too much, and learned how to kill without disturbing his conscience.

He was a barrel-chested man who saw himself as a military leader, but seemed to make little separation between the causes that he served and his own out-sized ego. Late in the film, thinking that he's gotten too fat, Carlos has unwanted love handles removed with liposuction surgery. A vane revolutionary indeed.

Carlos, originally made for French television and shown in the U.S. on the Sundance Channel, is now making its way to specialized theatrical venues around the country. (In Denver, it can be see at the newly inaugurated Starz Denver FilmCenter, located at 2150 E. Colfax Ave. in the same complex as The Tattered Cover and Twist & Shout.) Eventually, it will be released on DVD, where you can watch it in more leisurely fashion.

Assayas, a director who seems to march to no predictable beat, has made telling family dramas (The Summer Hours), agitated oddball movies (Irma Vep) and global thrillers (Boarding Gate). Without doubt, Carlos stands as Assayas' most ambitious movie to date. The sheer number of locations, languages, and violent set pieces would be daunting for any director. Carlos' mini-sreies length, which allows for deep immersion in this foreign and often-frightening world, must have been a challenge, as well.

Densely populated by the shifting cast of characters in Carlos' life, the movie makes little attempt to explain Carlos, who seemed to be the kind of revolutionary who had no trouble enjoying luxury when it was available to him. Assayas, who admits to some fictionalization, gives us a portrait of Carlos in action, following his stormy career and allowing us to draw our own conclusions about it.

We certainly don't root for Carlos, but once we're inside his circle, we begin to see the ways in which violence became the norm for Carlos and those around him. While watching the movie, I was reminded of gangster films that bore deeply into criminal lives. Ramirez makes no effort to hide Carlos' brutal side, but we couldn't bear to watch if that were all of it: Ramirez also understands the way Carlos learned to attract others with charm, personal magnetism and even an unexpected capacity for courtesy.

In the early stages of his career, Carlos worked for and then found himself at odds with PFLP leader Wadie Haddad (Ahmad Kaabour). Haddad knew that Carlos could be a loose cannon and that he wouldn't easily submit to revolutionary discipline -- unless, of course, he happened to be enforcing it on others.

Carlos claims that he's fighting imperialism on behalf of the oppressed, but he seems to be most fulfilled when he's being treated like a celebrity of some revolution that most of the world failed to acknowledge. Could it be that Carlos simply craved notoriety and reveled in the power it gave him?

I'm not sure I know. I'm not even sure what conclusions can be drawn from entering the violent, murky world that Assayas so creates with so much immediacy. I do know that Carlos qualifies as an extraordinary filmmaking feat, a fascinating chronicle of the rise and fall of a man who seemed avid about devouring life while fully capable of destroying it.