“It has come to my attention that I may never again have power over another human being.” This is what we hear in Vladimir, a new black comedy on Netflix, the first time Rachel Weisz’s character—a nameless college professor—breaks the fourth wall. She goes on to lament the fact that she might never again inspire a “spontaneous erection” in a man. She worries that her students find the course she teaches, on American female authors, “passé,” before joking that her subject is “a bit broad.” Instantly, I was hooked. I watched all eight episodes in a single sitting.
Adapted from Julia May Jonas’s 2022 novel of the same name, Vladimir follows the married, middle-aged protagonist as she develops a lusty obsession with a new colleague at her elite American university, the married-but-flirty young Vlad, played by Leo Woodall, who seems to be revelling in being typecast as cougar bait (see Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy for further evidence; there’s even a similar slo-mo running scene beside a pool).
So far, so standard. After all, there’s no shortage of horny mid-life women on screen and in literature these days, from Nicole Kidman’s Romy in Babygirl to the narrator of Miranda July’s All Fours. Increasingly, there’s a whole cultural genre dedicated to exploring how desire at this stage of life can be truly destabilizing, especially if—like Weisz’s character—you are seeking to prove to yourself that you’ve “still got it.” During her first interaction with Vlad he makes an offhand remark about her “seniority,” apparently sparking an all-consuming need from her to seduce him.
What strikes me as different about this character is that she goes against a certain archetype: one that assumes women in middle age have their shit together. OK, she’s got a great job, a beautiful house. But in many ways, her melodramatic behavior is akin to that of a teenager (albeit a very unhinged one). She decides to befriend Vlad’s wife because, as she says: “Thou shalt not covet your friend’s husband.” When she suspects her husband is cheating on her with Vlad’s wife, she only ups her efforts to seduce him. She blackmails, she lies, she tricks. She spikes drinks, she fakes sex, she imprisons (that’s not a spoiler, it’s in the first scene). She is messy with a capital M. Stylistically too, the decision to have Weisz addres the audience directly—her willing co-conspirators—in wink-wink, nudge-nudge style, is surely a way to draw parallels with one of TV’s messiest women ever: Fleabag.
Another key difference: in spite of all her best efforts (and bad behavior), the protagonist’s affair with Vlad is largely imagined. She reads his novel and masturbates. She writes about him and masturbates. Unlike Romy’s sexual awakening in Babygirl, or the many illicit motel room trysts in All Fours, here our heroine’s fantasy remains, for the most part, just that. Her escapades are not even about Vlad specifically, hot though he is. She knows her colleagues gossip about her fellow academic husband’s scandalous dalliances with students on campus (they have an open marriage), and that the popularity of her own class is being usurped by that of a younger, cooler teacher. It’s about regaining control and reclaiming her sexual power, a refusal to succumb to the invisibility so often framed as an inevitability for women as they get older.