When Rumours was first about to premiere, the early word was that it was co-director Guy Maddin’s most ‘accessible’ film to date. The fact that this is absolutely true is testament to just how madcap a filmmaker the Canadian auteur is. Co-directed alongside the Johnson brothers Evan and Galen, this ‘easy way in’ to Maddin’s filmography is still packed to bursting with the bizarre – wanking zombies, a giant pulsing brain in the woods, and the hapless leaders of the G7 failing miserably to contend with the end of the world. The result is something anarchic and throwaway yet still immensely entertaining, blunt force satire delivered with just a dollop of perverse Canadian patriotism.
The G7 leaders have been brought together for a summit in rural Germany to discuss ‘the international crisis’, which is never explained to us and that the leaders themselves seem to have a very poor grasp on, settling on their course of action being to draft a provisional statement about possible solutions down the line. It’s hardly the most original satire idea in the world that liberal democracies are a morass of bureaucratic uselessness and safe buzzwords in place of helpful, decisive action, but the sheer joy that the leaders get out of the utter pablum they’re drafting is still very funny.
As they’re in Germany, the team is initially led by Chancellor Hilda (Cate Blanchett), but as things start to get spooky, with the staff and lesser diplomats disappearing while the floppily preserved Iron Age ‘bog bodies’ start rising from the ground and masturbating into bonfires, it’s the Canadian Prime Minister Maxime (Roy Dupuis) who takes the lead. Handsome, sensitive, and athletic, he’s the only real ‘hero’ of the group, Maddin and the Johnsons making up for the fact that Canada was the last nation to be invited into the G7 with just a little bit of punchy national pride.
That’s not to say that Maxim isn’t still an idiot like his compatriots though, and everyone here is very funny as their trappings of power and control are instantly upturned and chucked into a filthy ditch. While Hilda is obviously a Merkel stand-in and Charles Dance’s take on the US President – sleepy, ancient, prone to gibberish – is clearly Biden (though, in a fun, unexplained touch, Dance keeps his native British accent), everyone else is an original, from Nikki Amuka-Bird as the flustered British PM to Denis Menochet as pseudointellectual French President Sylvain.
Is there a point to be deciphered from this singling out of Germany and America? Maybe, but maybe not – at one point Sylvain actually asks himself the same question about the symbolism of each nation’s leader’s reactions as the chaos takes hold, but he’s swiftly told off for talking nonsense. Individual nations are less on the script’s hit list than the entire ‘rules-based liberal order’ and its obsession with useless overanalysis and technocratic solutions to problems that require something robust and immediate. There’s some climate change stuff in here, AI too, and a bit involving Alicia Vikander that seems to very genuinely mean literally nothing, so if it’s incisive and original satire you’re aiming for, Rumours is not that film.
Maddin’s typical stylings – ominous fogs, bright yet sickly colours enveloping everything – are here, from the nuclear bright sunlight in the day before everything goes wrong to the purple mists rolling through as the group try and find shelter from the bog-zombies in the cold night, but they are a little muted. There’s nothing anywhere near as experimental as you’d find in, say, My Winnipeg or The Forbidden Room, but the trade-off is that you *do* get to hear Cate Blanchett say the phrase ‘sexual perverts’ in a very earnest German accent, and that ain’t nothing.
Rumours could certainly be frustrating to some, but if you allow yourself to get on its wavelength, then following its nonsense to the bitter end is a great time (I found myself relatively frequently comparing the journey to a goofier version of Remedy games Control and Alan Wake 2, always a good sign). By the conclusion, the group have achieved nothing and helped no-one, and yet they still stand triumphant, ushering in a new dawn of apocalypse that promises to be just as incompetently commanded as the world we live in now. Bizarrely, there’s a comfort in it.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 