Vladimir’s cold open ends with a shocker. You know the beautiful, slightly nervous-seeming woman played by Rachel Weisz who’s spent the last couple minutes speaking directly to us through the camera? The professor and writer who’s afraid she’s losing her edge, who thinks her students find her out of touch, who fears “I may never again have power over another human being” and that she may “never be the cause of spontaneous erection ever again”? That power fear, at least turns out to be exaggerated: She’s holding the man we’ll come to know as Vladimir (Leo Woodall) prisoner in a cabin, chained to a chair in his underwear. (The camera helpfully pans down to reveal that last bit.)
But I think Vladimir’s real shock value comes later, when Weisz’s unnamed narrator — I’ll refer to her as the professor — once again breaks the fourth wall to talk to the viewing audience, as she does throughout the episode. “It’s very hard for me to understand how” — here she is interrupted by her womanizing husband, John (John Slattery), about the steak he’s grilling before she resumes — “consensual affairs that were fun not despite the power dynamic but because of the power dynamic, could be thought of as hurtful or damaging after the fact.”
It’s also making a point. Even before she chains a guy to a chair, the professor is no one’s idea of an ideal romantic heroine. Her and John’s open marriage of long standing — one “without all the awful communication” of today’s newfangled arrangements — has effectively given him license to use his classes as a dating app. Now several former students are alleging sexual misconduct.
Since John technically broke neither the rules of their marriage nor their small liberal arts college’s code of conduct, she’s standing by her man. She’s had affairs too — like with David (Matt Walsh), a frumpy colleague whose profile alone was enough to make her quietly orgasm during faculty meetings (“in the right pair of pants”). The only reason this is different, really, is because young women today make themselves unhappy on the internet, or so she says.
This attitude, to me, is a bigger and more interesting surprise than holding some guy hostage. Both the narrator and her husband John are pretty firmly behind the idea that affairs between professor and student are okay. Didn’t she herself want to fuck every professor she had, male or female, avoiding it only out of timidity rather than an ethical code or a sense of self-preservation? She’s not wrong that power differentials, age gaps, authority-figure fetishes, and so on are compelling to a great many people, of all ages and genders and positions on that power spectrum.
But boy, is this dismissive of the ever-increasing number of women coming forward to say that John’s conduct was ultimately uncomfortable and unwelcome. It’s also letting John off the hook for not keeping it in his pants and not shitting where he eats, even if you believe he’s committed no grave moral violation. The adoring students of her Women in American Literature class are taking coffee meetings with her to tell her she’s too hot and too smart and, again, too hot to put up with this shit from a man. She’s the subject of relentless gossip among all her coworkers, who barely conceal it. She has to show up late to meetings to avoid the inevitable discussion of her husband’s case(s).
This is all six weeks before the chains and the cabin, right around the time of the faculty meeting where the narrator first meets Vladimir, a hot new professor in every sense. Like our heroine, he’s a writer with one book to his name so far. (She’s obviously way deeper into “so far” than he is.) He’s got a baby face obscured partially by a beard. He has an easy way about him that borders on shameless in terms of his easy, at times physical flirtation with the professor.
She’s been into him ever since she glimpsed him on campus as a total stranger, when each caught the other’s eye. By the end of the faculty party she’s met his gorgeous young wife Cynthia (Jessica Henwick) and their baby daughter (boo!), but Cynthia encourages Vladimir to get together with the professor for drinks without her (yay!). “I want him to drink, it’s good for him,” Cynthia says. Is every faculty marriage open, or what?
After a quick detour to the Charlotte Haze bakery — from the title on down, this thing is full of Lolita references — where she picks up a special cake from a bitter student she once failed (Kayli Carter), the professor and John have dinner at home with their daughter Sid (Ellen Robertson) and her wife Alexis (Tattiawna Jones). A funny debate about whether the Kardashian saga qualifies as a classical tragedy soon devolves into the narrator breaking her word and outing her husband’s affairs and subsequent suspension from teaching to their daughter. The professor even discloses their open marraige, a secret Sid rather over-dramatically compares to the Holocaust.
The fight makes the professor realize how fed up she is with John’s bullshit. She kicks him out of the house, a fate he accepts laughingly. (You get the sense that when you’re as hot, smart, white, wealthy, and old as John, nothing really needs to bother you if you don’t want it to.) Alone, the professor falls asleep listening to an interview with Vladimir online.
And like magic, there he is on her doorstep the next day, for the drinks they’d previously agreed to. You can practically hear “Dream Weaver” playing in her mind. Flashes of the two of them having sex ricochet through her brain. “Is this a good time?” he asks. Probably, bro!
Rachel Weisz has played sexy women of a certain age before, pretty much since she became a sexy woman of a certain age herself. She’s one of those actors who seems keenly interested in exploring the subject of sexuality in their work. But I’ve never seen her come at it from quite this angle before. Her narrator character isn’t steely or commanding, she isn’t repressed and ready to explode — she’s just kind of some dude, really. She’s attractive and intelligent but awkward and insecure about her age. She’s no stranger being on either end of an affair, but seemingly unable to conceive of herself as having another one, until now anyway.
All of the professor’s sexual energy is right near the surface, and it’s up to Weisz, Jonas’s script, and the camera of directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini to capture and convey that. It’s in the way she objectifies Vladimir, devouring him with her eyes as reflected in closeups on individual body parts. It’s in the frank way she describes her and John’s past, coupled with the nervous way she handles her interactions with Vladimir — that disconnect exists because she’s powerfully attracted to this guy, it’s not some now-dulled memory.
It’s Weisz’s job to make you wonder whether she’ll give in and kiss this guy at any given moment, or run away screaming. It probably goes without saying that she succeeds, but I’ll say it anyway. Weisz is a fascinating and very funny actress; she was a scream in her dual roles as the Mantle twins in Alice Birch’s Dead Ringers remake, as dark as that material got, and a generation of moviegoers still remember her light touch as the heroine of The Mummy.
Vladimir makes Weisz’s professor a comical character, having her giggle nervously when he mentions his quads and lie about how much everyone loves her salad and so forth. But it also spares none of the actors smoldering sexuality, thanks to her frank voiceovers and hot blink-and-you’ll-miss-them fantasy visions. The combination/contrast is such a smart and novel choice, on everyone’s part. Even the Ferris Bueller fourth wall breaking, a real break from the norm on TV, works because Weisz’s performance and Jonas’s writing are both charming and unpredictable. Cutting, provocative, laught-out-loud funny, and horny as hell? It’s gonna be a good semester.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.
