The common feature of all autocratic strongmen — or, in the case of Elena Vernham (Kate Winslet) in The Regime, an autocratic strongwoman — is weakness. They tend to be vain, impressionable, insecure, and often moronic, and their only answer to a crisis (or even just a petty slight) is violence and oppression, enforced by the military and supported by bureaucratic sycophants and media propagandists. They promote themselves through nationalist kitsch, hold power through “free and fair†elections that are anything but, and are thoroughly insulated in a palace bubble of luxury and paranoia.
And so it’s a sign of the strongwoman’s weakness that Elena, the leader of a fictional Central European republic that looks like The Grand Budapest Hotel meets The Death of Stalin, responds to a domestic crisis by lashing out wildly. With the economy in free fall and the country’s dodgy human-rights reputation further damaged by the Army gunning down 12 protestors at a cobalt mine, Elena’s instinct is to hire one of those murderous soldiers, Corporal Herbert Zubak (Matthias Schoenaerts), to shadow her. Zubak’s tasks would be confusing to him even if he wasn’t heavily sedated during their first meeting, but the gesture from Elena is telling. “They behaved like animals, those protestors,†she tells Zubak. “You soldiers just reacted. I was right to send you boys down that mine, in spite of what my critics say.â€
The dynamic between Elena and Zubak shifts dramatically over the course of just this single episode, suggesting Elena’s loosening grip on her tinpot empire and Zubak’s shrewdness in recognizing just how to exploit it. But the tone of this nasty, perverse, politically astute comedy links firmly to other work by creator Will Tracy, a former Onion editor-in-chief who wrote on Succession and co-wrote (with Seth Reiss, another Onion alum) The Menu, a satire about a three-star kitchen that is its own brutal, authoritarian regime. Tracy hails from the Armando Iannucci school of comedy, specializing in the follies of the super-elite, whose extreme ineptitude and venality tend to be hilarious and destructive at the same time. The Regime is Waystar RoyCo on a global stage, history repeating itself as farce.
There’s more than a little bit of Dr. Strangelove, too, in the paranoia that grips Elena’s palace, even as her regime is celebrating “Victory Day,†when she beat the former “Neo-Marxist†chancellor in an election that may or may not have been on the up-and-up. (Given America’s interest in the country’s cobalt riches, it has the feel of the classic, CIA-orchestrated, capitalist-friendly, right-wing overthrows in Central and South America.) Elena is like Sterling Hayden’s General Jack D. Ripper in Strangelove, only instead of fretting about Communists fluoridating the water and polluting our “precious bodily fluids,†she’s convinced that spores have contaminated the palace. We don’t know whether the spore obsession even originated with her, but there’s no more on-the-nose metaphor for a crumbling empire than a chancellor literally dismantling her own palace.
Elena’s vulnerabilities have given an opening for others to pounce, specifically her finance minister, Susan (Pippa Haywood), and her doctor (Kenneth Collard), who just happens to be attached to Susan’s hip. When Elena hosts an official reception with the CEO of an American energy company as the most important guest, even she can sense the vultures circling. Susan has been pressing for a closer relationship with America, and the massacre at the mine has given the CEO an opening to negotiate a controlling stake in her cobalt business. When it comes to business, Americans certainly have the capacity to look the other way on human-rights violations, but in cold negotiating terms, it gives them more leverage over the details.
The reception is the episode’s comic centerpiece, as funny and revealing of character as Kendall Roy’s notorious “L to the OG†rap tribute to his father on Succession. Elena’s number isn’t a DJ Squiggle original but a lounge version of Chicago’s “If You Leave Me Now,†showcasing Winslet’s unidentifiable accent and immense distance from Peter Cetera’s range. “If you leave me now, you’ll take away the very heart of me,†she sings before telling the crowd, “You will; I’ll be heartbroken.†It’s one of those magical moments, like the Kendall rap, where someone is far too powerful to be talked out of a terrible idea, and it’s another sign of her vanity suppressing good judgment.
As all this madness unfolds, Zubak seems to be twisting haplessly in the wind, right up to the point where he dramatically seizes power. He’s told that his job is to follow Elena around, taking humidity measurements with a hydrometer and keep others from touching her. But when he does both during the reception, Elena quietly takes him aside and slaps him hard on the face for making her look ridiculous to the foreign guests. “Next time, turn the gun on yourself,†she tells him, referring to the massacre. “Put it in your mouth, you greasy little fucking cow.†His banishment from her sphere proves only temporary, however, after he confronts a large intruder in her bedroom and beats him within an inch of his life. That’s the Zubak that Elena wanted by her side.
The surprise for her — and perhaps for us — is that Zubak has been paying attention. He can see the machinations behind her spore sickness and the negotiations around the cobalt mines, and he is finally in a position to be frank with her about it. “You told me to crush them and anyone who makes you weak,†he tells her. “They’ve cut our balls off, Chief, and now they’re laughing at us because you dance with foreign cash like a sick fucking bear at the circus.†This is all music to Elena’s ears, giving her the strength to sweep Susan and her doctor out of the palace for their traitorous conspiracies and hardening her resolve to deal with the Americans. It also, potentially, makes this demented, murderous soldier the most powerful man in the country. The strongwoman remains weak.
Spores
• We’ll see how much influence she might wield, but Andrea Riseborough gets a healthy percentage of nasty one-liners here as Elena’s chief minister, who lives to insult the common grunts who are renovating (and re-renovating) the palace. As she leads Zubak to his room, she warns, “I’ve cared for this slag heap my whole life, so don’t go soiling it. And invest in some moisturizers, because the dehumidifiers turn your skin into a mummy’s asshole.â€
• Elena has her blind spots, but she’s aware enough of her surroundings to scoff at Susan’s pronouncement that “the people†want growth. “Oh,†she says, “you can hear them grunting from your country house?â€
• A funny backstory for Elena’s put-upon husband (Guillaume Gallienne), who’s first shown describing the mine massacre to Vogue as “a little peppery†and later nonchalantly tells guests at the reception the cute story of meeting her in Paris and eventually leaving his wife and child at her insistence, never to see them again.
• One of Elena’s minor quirks, it would appear, is keeping her dead father’s corpse available for viewing a full year after his death and then complaining loudly to staff about the unsightly spots that have developed on his rotting face.