Brilliantly acted, HBO's `Regime' flirts with satire but lacks political bite
“Regime,” which premiered Sunday on HBO, is a well-made, beautifully designed, marvelously acted mess of a series. Created by Will Tracy, a writer for “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” and directed by Stephen Frears, it stars Kate Winslet as the head of a contemporary unnamed fictional Middle European country — like Ruritania in “The Prisoner of Zenda” or Syldavia in Tintin or Zubrowka in “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” if less charming. Her title is Chancellor, though the palace appointments are ostentatiously royal. Like a monarch, she is identified with the state, and like an absolute monarch, she identifies the state with herself. (But the state is not in great shape.)
It's a comedy, if often a grim, violent one — until it's not.
Like real-world autocrats, Winslet's Elena Vernham is a person to tiptoe around and agree with. And mentally unstable. She believes the palace is infected with mold and is having it rebuilt. She demands that no one breathe in her direction, finding the smell intolerable. She converses with the corpse of her father, apparently a chancellor before her, rotting away in a glass coffin. (“Silly old husk. You've got spots now. That's new.”) She delivers long daily radio addresses and sings pop songs to captive audiences. (Winslet's rendition of Chicago's “If You Leave Me Now” is expertly off-key.)
Into the palace and her life comes Corporal Herbert Zubak (Matthias Schoenaerts), called “Butcher” to his displeasure, a soldier involved in a massacre of protesting miners, who has been more or less abducted to the palace to serve as Elena's latest mold-monitor. He walks ahead of her with a hydrometer to measure the relative humidity of any space she's about to enter. Zubak is a volatile person, violent against others and himself, cowed into a ridiculous, demeaning position. But when he foils an assassination attempt, Zubak becomes Elena's protector, physician (using “potato steam” to “clear toxins”), soil-serving caterer and a Rasputin-like influence that shapes the government — or court, one might more readily say.
Tracy has sampled various autocratic regimes, current and past, in creating his imaginary nation. The generic imperialism of Elena's late father's dream of “reunification” with a neighboring republic, which she terms “an expression of peace and love toward our countrymen across the border,” easily calls to mind Russia vis-àvis the Ukraine.