“This is just like television, only you can see much further,” says Peter Sellers with a wonderfully colorful sentence in Hal Ashby’s political satire Welcome, Mr. Chance (1979). The film tells how a gardener experiences his surroundings for the first time after a long life spent exclusively in the garden of a Washington mansion. Washington’s cynical political biotope is also otherwise astonishing. But it is precisely his complete unworldliness that allows Chancey Gardner to walk through the undergrowth of a power-obsessed environment unscathed and ultimately rise to US President. A post he accepts with the same mild smile as a cup of tea.
Until a few months ago, Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s story could have been seen as a spin-off of an ingenious American screenplay idea. No, Ronald Reagan is not a fair comparison for the current President of Ukraine; Reagan was governor of California for eight years before reaching for the highest office in the state. He was allowed to study in peace, although he soon profited from the accusation of being an actor. Asked by a journalist in 1966 how he would fare as California state leader, the lead actor in the chimpanzee film Bedtime for Bonzo quipped, “I don’t know, I’ve never played a governor.”