Rachel Weisz is great as a feverishly horny professor in ‘Vladimir’

Rachel Weisz has the kind of classical beauty that could launch ships or sink them, cheekbones like alabaster and eyes that smoulder by default, but her real genius is making that face a canvas for the uncontainable. In The Favourite (JioHotstar), her Lady Sarah is a political shark written like a Jane Austen heroine who’s mislaid her patience. She’s the mad queen’s lover, handler, speech writer, counsellor, bully and best friend, a single person embodying court, cabinet and confessional. It’s objectively absurd, yet Weisz sells it with cold authority. Across her career she’s done klutzes, idealists, addicts, cheats and twins, but Lady Sarah may be the purest expression of her singular gift: to make women who should be “too much” feel precisely, dangerously right.

In Disobedience she wrestles faith, lust and loss in a sweaty, selfish knot; she turns pulp peril into personal triumph in The Mummy; in The Constant Gardener she burns righteous; in Deep Blue Sea she crumbles gorgeously; in Dead Ringers, she—spectacularly—plays twins who devour life, a grand opera of double-derangement. Weisz never dials down her characters’ hunger or mess, instead amplifying it to truth, turning excess into essence. These are literary fever-dreams made flesh: too ambitious, too broken, too alive to be mere heroines.

In the new Netflix dramedy Vladimir, Rachel Weisz plays a hungry professor. Over eight snappy episodes, as she wrestles with lust (and guilt) for a younger, married colleague, the actress gives us a quick course in desire. It’s well worth attending. As we know from college, even when the course doesn’t specifically teach you anything new, the right professor is worth your time.

Two minutes in, it’s clear that this is a Fleabag facsimile, an aging academic take on that magnificent Phoebe Waller-Bridge series: Weisz keeps breaking, and confiding in, the fourth wall, and her character is never referred to by name—something that may have worked well in the books, but loses its charm when the subtitles constantly refer to her as protagonist (“Protagonist sighs”). We first meet Weisz midway through what looks like a crime, and then we the viewers are swiftly whisked—in trite-and-tested Netflix ways—to when the chaos began.

“It was a different time.” These words appear on screen, in parenthesis, below the “Six Weeks Earlier” text, and that bracketed phrase forms the narrative backbone—not least because far too many of the characters keep saying it. That “back in my day” consideration is one many ageing characters (and viewers) lean on too heavily to explain and dismiss and make sense of and hide behind to excuse sins that, one may have hoped, would be past their sell-by date. The lens for acceptable behaviour has shifted, though what Vladimir tries to emphasise—as it props up competing arguments from competing generations against one another—is that everyone has a lens entirely their own.

The series is named like a Putin biography because of the object of the protagonist’s attentions: Vladimir Vladinski, a young and fit professor with a name as absurdly alliterative as the characters in Nabokov’s Lolita. The protagonist is immediately drawn to this hunk of man-meat, a Vladimir who quotes Vladimir, and her hunger pangs manifest themselves in quick, hot cutaways where she imagines that the two of them weren’t merely discussing salads in front of the faculty but instead making loud and passionate love.

Vladimir is played by Leo Woodall, a sort of muscular Charlie Brown figure with a “gosh, shucks” kind of scruffy appeal, the kind of man who flirts openly and then immediately walks it back with an exaggeratedly friendly emoji. He doesn’t seem particularly charismatic or witty or even nice, from what he texts to the way he treats his wife, but in the protagonist’s eyes, raising him to the pedestal of a literary lover, he can do no wrong. He seems unworthy of Weisz, but then who wouldn’t?

John Slattery plays, in his trademark way, her husband John, another creepy but worldly silver fox, the kind of man calls for whose cancellation would be drowned out by calls for his tell-all memoir. He is facing a disciplinary trial for bedding students over the years, and Weisz—while privately repelled—is by his side because they had an open marriage (called, in different times, “an arrangement”) and because, as she plaintively tells confused students who wonder why she isn’t calling him out, the consensual affairs he had “were fun not despite the power dynamic, but because of it.”

Their marriage is prickly but plausible. She tells him to do something about his eyebrows, he suggests she get her privates waxed. Their intimacy, their repugnance, their pettiness, all feels lived-in. The actors are, however, better than the series. Weisz is wonderful as the articulate cougar, playing it with just enough of a Nigella Lawson oversexedness. She makes the fourth wall feel like a confessional, but the show itself feels eminently forgettable. The kind of airport-read that the Wharton-wielding protagonist would never read.

The world of academia and cancellation is mired frequently for fiction these days. The Chair (Netflix), starring Sandra Oh, is a superb satire on academia and entitlement, that successfully skewers both sides instead of, like this show, merely pointing at them. Compared to anything that provokes and requires serious and literary thought, Vladimir is… a quickie. It’s for a different time.

Raja Sen is a critic, screenwriter and columnist. His first play, a murder mystery called The Simla Affair, recently opened in Delhi. He is currently writing a horror film.