The Regime Series-Premiere Recap: To Err Is Humid
The Regime Series-Premiere Recap: To Err Is Humid
By
Scott Tobias,
a freelance film critic who also writes about TV and pop culture
Memorial
Season 1
Episode 1
Editorâs Rating
4 stars
The Regime
Memorial
Season 1
Episode 1
Editorâs Rating
4 stars
Photo: Miya Mizuno/HBO
The common feature of all autocratic strongmen â or, in the case of Elena Vernham (Kate Winslet) in The Regime, an autocratic strongwoman â 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 âfree and fairâ elections that are anything but, and are thoroughly insulated in a palace bubble of luxury and paranoia.
And so itâs a sign of the strongwomanâs 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 countryâs dodgy human-rights reputation further damaged by the Army gunning down 12 protestors at a cobalt mine, Elenaâs instinct is to hire one of those murderous soldiers, Corporal Herbert Zubak (Matthias Schoenaerts), to shadow her. Zubakâs tasks would be confusing to him even if he wasnât heavily sedated during their first meeting, but the gesture from Elena is telling. âThey behaved like animals, those protestors,â she tells Zubak. âYou 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 Elenaâs loosening grip on her tinpot empire and Zubakâs 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.
Thereâs more than a little bit of Dr. Strangelove, too, in the paranoia that grips Elenaâs palace, even as her regime is celebrating âVictory Day,â when she beat the former âNeo-Marxistâ chancellor in an election that may or may not have been on the up-and-up. (Given Americaâs interest in the countryâs 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 Haydenâs General Jack D. Ripper in Strangelove, only instead of fretting about Communists fluoridating the water and polluting our âprecious bodily fluids,â sheâs convinced that spores have contaminated the palace. We donât know whether the spore obsession even originated with her, but thereâs no more on-the-nose metaphor for a crumbling empire than a chancellor literally dismantling her own palace.
Elenaâs 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 Susanâs 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 episodeâs comic centerpiece, as funny and revealing of character as Kendall Royâs notorious âL to the OGâ rap tribute to his father on Succession. Elenaâs number isnât a DJ Squiggle original but a lounge version of Chicagoâs âIf You Leave Me Now,â showcasing Winsletâs unidentifiable accent and immense distance from Peter Ceteraâs range. âIf you leave me now, youâll take away the very heart of me,â she sings before telling the crowd, âYou will; Iâll be heartbroken.â Itâs one of those magical moments, like the Kendall rap, where someone is far too powerful to be talked out of a terrible idea, and itâs 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. Heâs 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. âNext time, turn the gun on yourself,â she tells him, referring to the massacre. âPut it in your mouth, you greasy little fucking cow.â 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. Thatâs the Zubak that Elena wanted by her side.
The surprise for her â and perhaps for us â 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. âYou told me to crush them and anyone who makes you weak,â he tells her. âTheyâve cut our balls off, Chief, and now theyâre laughing at us because you dance with foreign cash like a sick fucking bear at the circus.â This is all music to Elenaâs 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.
âą Weâll see how much influence she might wield, but Andrea Riseborough gets a healthy percentage of nasty one-liners here as Elenaâs 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, âIâve cared for this slag heap my whole life, so donât go soiling it. And invest in some moisturizers, because the dehumidifiers turn your skin into a mummyâs asshole.â
âą Elena has her blind spots, but sheâs aware enough of her surroundings to scoff at Susanâs pronouncement that âthe peopleâ want growth. âOh,â she says, âyou can hear them grunting from your country house?â
âą A funny backstory for Elenaâs put-upon husband (Guillaume Gallienne), whoâs first shown describing the mine massacre to Vogue as âa little pepperyâ 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.
âą One of Elenaâs minor quirks, it would appear, is keeping her dead fatherâs 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.
The Regime Series-Premiere Recap: To Err Is Humid
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