Vladimir TV show on Netflix: Rachel Weisz’s erotic series is more thorny than sexy

It wouldn’t be lost on Leo Woodall that he very quickly became the go-to younger man of middle aged women’s desire.

First it was Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, where he played one of the men our titular heroine hooked up with after she emerged from her years-long grief, and now he’s the subject of Rachel Weisz’s gaze in Vladimir.

Adapted from a buzzy book of the same name by Julia May Jonas, by the author herself, Vladimir is billed as a series about desire and obsession, but it ultimately reveals itself as a story about shifting generational attitudes to sex and power.

The generational thing is significant because Vladimir does not make overtly made hay out of the age difference between Woodall’s character, the eponymous Vlad, and Weisz’s character, whose name is not spoken in the show and is credited as just M.

M is a long-standing literary professor at a small university, the kind the Americans call a “liberal arts college”. She is married to John (John Slattery), the former chair of the English department who has been put a leave pending a review after a slate of his former students reported him for sleeping with them.

M and John have an open marriage, and she knew about the affairs, but what she really minds is that she now expected to publicly disavow her husband’s behaviour. M refuses to buy into ideas that anything unsavoury happened because, as far she was concerned, everyone was a consenting adult.

She even recounts that when she herself was a university student, she too embarked on dalliances with professors, that there was something exciting about the forbidden-ness of it.

But the politics of the controversy threatens to consume her own stalled career when other students and colleagues don’t see it the same way.

At the same time, a new assistant professor joins the department, the aforementioned Vladimir Vlandinski (Woodall), whose wife Cynthia (Jessica Henwick) has also joined as a popular new adjunct professor.

M first sees Vlad in the supermarket before she meets him at a staff get-together, and she is immediately attracted to him. He sparks something dormant in her, and she becomes obsessed with the idea of him, rather than him.

She daydreams about fantasy sexual encounters, and ends up making some choices that are definitely, um, alarming.

Even though the show – and the book before it – is solidly from M’s perspective, she is our (unreliable) narrator, it’s called Vladimir. Because he is the subject of her infatuation, and he only exists through her gaze.

Woodall is also primarily framed by female filmmakers – every episode has at least one woman director and all bar one episode are written by women, although both cinematographers are men.

The camera follows him as M sees him, fixated on his rippling muscles as he dives into a pool (not for nothing, Woodall does the same in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy and emerges wearing a wet white shirt a la the BBC Pride and Prejudice miniseries).

You only get a sense of the “real” Vlad when he stops becoming entirely fantastical to M.

While M is exerting power over Vlad, it’s mostly in her mind, and their age gap becomes less consequential

As opposed to the very real imbalance, as perceived by the rest of the college, between John and his former students, even if that’s not M’s contention.

The series is interested in these questions of how different generations and different times experience and see things differently, as well as questions of agency and accountability.

It’s a thorny series, and it doesn’t arrive at one perspective over another, and despite positioning the story through M, we’re still invited to tussle with what she tells us, literally because there are constant fourth-wall breaks.

But M is no hero either, nor does she encapsulate some kind of frustrated middle-aged female desire. This isn’t that show.

You might find Vladimir slightly unsatisfying if you were looking for a more concrete, moralistic “here’s what we’re thinking”.

But isn’t the more interesting conversation the constantly shifting questions of what is and isn’t acceptable at any one time, to any one person? There are no easy answers.

Vladimir is streaming on Netflix