ANDMmanuel Carrère, who with power has a certain familiarity, in the recent reportage from the G7 published on Nouvel OBS and on The reading of the Corriere della Sera He hints at the wink “accomplices” who directed him Emmanuel Macron, but also to the disappointment for not having been admitted with him on the fly by helicopter (“an event Pr+3”, only three companions admitted for the president. But he, he claims, has some chance only “starting from Pr+6 or 7. Which is not bad”). Emmanuel Carrère is, not surprisingly, the writer that director Olivier Assayas has chosen as co-writer to translate In images that revealing story of the darkest dynamics of the power it is The wizard of the Kremlinbest seller of the Italian writer Giuliano da Empoli, Winner of the Grand Prix de l’Acadèmie Française, who will be seen in the exhibition.
“With Emmanuel we have always been friends,” explains Assayas. “We started together, as young critics, it was the beginning of the 80s. He wrote on PositifI on Cahiers du cinèma (the two historic competing magazines of French film criticism, editor’s note) »
The wizard of the Kremlin it is a political thriller, as already Wasp Networkhis 2019 film, the story of a group of Cuban spies active in Miami in the late 90s, also in that case based on the book of a journalist.
Giuliano da Empoli is a journalist and novelist, but of power he knows the most remote mechanisms because he practiced them himself: he was a councilor of Matteo Renzi when he was prime minister, he had accompanied him from the town hall of Florence (where he had been councilor for culture, ed) in Rome. And in the novel, which has had an incredible success, tells the power of Vladimir Putin’s power. He does it through a lateral character, one of his spin doctors. In the book it’s called Vadim Baraov (Paul Dano plays it in the film, editor’s note), a name of invention, but inspired by a man who really existed, Vladislav Surkov, the theorist who has made that the Internet became the battlefield of the new Cold War we live today.
Paul Dano is Vadim Baraov in “The Wizard of the Kremlin-The magician of the Kremlin” by Olivier Assayas. Photo: Carole Bethuel © Curious Films – Gaumont)
Behind every great autocrates there is a spin doctor: The apprentice of Ali Abbasi had revealed us the role of Roy Cohn in the origin of Donald Trump’s fortune.
The wizard of the Kremlin It above all speaks of modern strategies of power. Not only does what happened in Russia in the years of Putin’s ascent from the Kgb ranks at the helm of the Russian Federation: tells the radical transformation that power has undergone in our time.
Creativity, in politics as in this case, but above all in art, is always at the center of its cinema. In Demonlover (2002) The nucleus was the world of video games, in Sils Maria the theater, the game of couples was set in the Parisian editorial world, Irma Vep spoke of a television series. Did you discover something about the mystery of creation, after having thought about it so much?
On the contrary, I discovered that I cannot go further, because art brings with it the mystery and it is an insoluble mystery. The art is in a gray area between the imaginary and real world. Throughout my life I have been obsessed with the fact that our imaginary life, the way in which our gaze modifies the world, generates something that is located between experience and dreamy: that is the place of art. I am obsessed with this space and I think it is there that all my films take place. I find that there is a misunderstanding on the nature of cinema, which is conventionally divided between documentary and fiction. For me the imaginary world, where we live with our bizarre, and the factual one where we live the life of every day are true and real both and it is art that makes the suture between the two.
Olivier Assayas, 70 years old. The French director and critic drew “Il Mago del Kremlin” from the novel by Giuliano da Empoli published by Mondadori. (Photo by Dominique Charriau/Wireimage)
She claims that each movie is a personal movie: her movie on Putin and her previous movie are in the same way, Hors du temps (We will see him next season), who was shot in his parents’ house, during Lockdown, with two actors to play her and his brother, the musical critic Michka Assayas?
Memory is a very powerful engine. I wrote Hors du Temps quickly. At a time when I was not yet used to living in the world after confinement. So I stayed in that house where we were locked up and wrote it there, hot. That historical, incredible event, had precipitated me in a complex personal story, that of unresolved family relationships, with my brother, my parents, and in particular with respect to that place where I had grown up. The idea of returning to my starting point, a threshold that I had not dared to cross until then, frightened me, even if the form that the film took is that of a burland of the autobiography, of a documentary but with actors. There are moments of lightness, but it remains a film inhabited by ghosts. I think everyone had fun doing it, but for me it remains a bewitched movie.
A psychoanalytic session …
The relationship with the ghosts is never easy, there is a thread between the beginning, my childhood, and the end, the death of loved ones. My parents and, in a more mysterious way, my grandparents who were of Hungarian origin and that I have never known. My grandfather was a rather well -known painter, my mother did everything to keep the artistic legacy of her father alive. I was raised in the admiration for my grandfather’s work and in my mother’s impossible mourning. So, as a young man, when I started drawing, I constantly confront me with his work: it is as if my mother had transmitted me the mission of being a painter, to prolong the life of his father, who died too young. A request too strong for a teenager. Then I had an interest in a different, modern, experimental art. And when the cinema has arrived in my life it is as if I had left the painting behind me. I abandoned him, but in the film I left my grandfather’s portrait as a young man, who watches over the house and his inhabitants.
In the film Micha Lecot, who plays his brother, gives an interview on Zoom and says: “The cinema industry is not completely in ruins, even if everyone has always said it, but risks becoming more rigid and less free”. Is it also his thought?
The pandemic was a timer, arrived in a moment of crisis and accelerated it: the power taken of the platforms was brutal and art became secondary, less necessary. Art does not produce dependence, while today we are obsessed with addiction. In front of Tarkovsky, Pasolini, Visconti, Bresson there is wonder, we ask ourselves, the world enters into crisis for the issues that authors like those ask. But the industry is less and less interested in making cinema like that, he wants to produce goods that generates sequels, prequels, spin-offs, objects that refer to a universe with defined contours. Today the dominant idea is that of the extensions, of the infinite series, the cinema has stiffened. The world of images will certainly find a way of leaving the crisis, but they are ways that cost more and more expensive. And when there is a lot of money in the middle, you are inevitably less free.
Vincent Macaigne, who plays Olivier Assayas, together with Nine d’Urso in “Hors du temps”.
In Hors du temps It is Vincent Macaigne who interpreted her. An actor with whom he is in the third film. How important is it to have an artistic family? The report Jean Pierre Leaud-François Truffaut (7 films together) continue to influence French cinema?
One of the reasons why I gave up painting is because I couldn’t stand loneliness. Of course, when I write they are alone, but then the moment comes that it gives me more joy: when the film is made and each one, both the crew and the actors, takes part in the collective work, when the practice of art is shared. At the beginning I was happy to recall the same troupe, a film after films, but then gradually I realized that there is a familiarity that was also born with the actors, which is very exciting and that one ends up building a friendly, as well as artistic relationship: it went so with Vincent, but also with Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart. Vincent appropriated my way of speaking and being, and he had a lot of fun, I think: this allowed me to face, in Irma Vep (the series with Alicia Vikander, taken from the 1996 Assayas film, editor’s note), intimate issues I hadn’t dared to talk about before, for example of my divorce from Maggie Cheung. And I was able to do it thanks to Vincent’s humor who freed me the heaviness of things.