Kate Winslet explores how to be a good autocrat

livemint.com:

Kate Winslet’s star turn, her lisping petulance recalls Veruca Salt, the spoiled brat in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory". Elena’s antics, amours and annexations are chronicled in “The Regime", a satirical drama out now in America and in Britain soon. It is a silly TV show that makes serious points about autocracy.

Elena and her country are sly composites of real people and places. There are echoes of communist Romania under the doomed Ceausescus and of the failed Soviet coup of 1991, when state tv broadcast “Swan Lake" (here it is “The Barber of Seville"). Elena’s ceremonial braided hairstyle evokes Yulia Tymoshenko, a Ukrainian firebrand.

But the main influence is Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The action begins with the arrival in the palace of a rough-hewn corporal, Herbert Zubak (Matthias Schoenaerts). Because of his role in a massacre, which nobody lets him forget, his nickname is “the Butcher".

This is the show’s first insight: Herbert is promoted not in spite of his disgrace but because of it. Elena, like other autocrats, knows compromised people are pliable. Systems like hers rely on mutual blackmail, whereby every courtier has dirt on all the others; an honest person is useless.

If blood is shed, many hands are dipped in it, as when Russian bigwigs appear with Mr Putin in his televised warmongering. Next, consider that portable oxygen chamber. Elena’s hypochondria—she has a horror of spores—spoofs germophobe leaders who are fanatical about their own welfare yet neglect their citizens’.

But her quirks are also exertions of power. If she says noxious spores pervade her palace, they do. Everyone applauds her atrocious singing, just as Mr Putin’s lickspittles let him win at ice hockey.