Film of the Week: ‘Rumours’ – The ‘official’ satire of the G7

The pride of Canada when it comes to experimental filmmaking, Guy Maddin, has teamed up once more with his regular collaborators Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson to deliver a wonderfully silly yet overstuffed satire you’ll have a hard time forgetting.

Rumours follows a bunch of ludicrously inefficient world leaders who meet at a G7 summit somewhere in rural Germany. They’re there to draft a joint statement on an unspecified global crisis.

There’s US President Edison Wolcott (Charles Dance), an obvious parody of Joe Biden, who mysteriously speaks in a British accent and loves him a good nap; bon vivant French President Sylvain Broulez (the perfectly cast Denis Ménochet); wannabe-efficient UK PM Cardosa Dewindt (Nikki Amuka-Bird) and the brooding hunk of a Canadian PM Maxime Laplace (Roy Dupuis), who share a saucy past; the modest Japanese PM Tatsuro Iwasaki (Takehiro Hira); and Italian PM Antonio Lamorte (Rolando Ravello), who readily confesses he once dressed up as Mussolini for a fancy dress party.

Leading the gormless Avengers of policy making is Chancellor of Germany Hilda Ortmann (Cate Blanchett, channeling Angela Merkel to perfection), who is VERY keen on “bilateral management.” In all its permutations.

They end up being so consumed by their hollow diplomacy babble and anodyne pontification that they don’t realise the apocalypse has begun.

Struggling to understand what’s going on, they get lost in the surrounding forest. Things get progressively weirder from there, with tortured passions resurfacing, furiously masturbating corpses showing up, and a giant brain unveiling itself.

Oh, and Alicia Vikander shows up as the Secretary General of the European Commission, speaking what the others interpret as an ancient dialect – but it’s actually Swedish.

The prestige international cast throw themselves into what can only be described as ‘I’m a G7 Politician Get Me Out Of Here’, which starts as a political soap opera and transitions into Buñuelian farce with heavy doses of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.

If you’re sold on that description, you’ll have a blast with this feverish lampoon and its many oddities.

Rumours finds its stride very early on. The laughs begin as soon as the opening credits hit, with the statement that the producers “would like to thank the G7 leaders for their support and consultation during the making of this movie.” It starts as it means to go on, but does tend to run out of steam in the second half.

The fact that the leaders accomplish nothing on their bonkers adventure and that this translates on screen as a lot of hot air leading nowhere is precisely the point; but mileage may vary with this obvious punchline. Additionally, the third act addition of an AI chatbot feels a little forced, as if Maddin & Co. were getting high off their own eccentric stash a smidge too much.

It’s hard to deny that it could have been significantly stronger as a short – or at least with 20 minutes shaved off the nearly 2-hour runtime.

Still, Maddin and the Johnsons’ unique brand of absurdism works, and this very weird film serves as a worthy reminder that ineffectual leaders who attempt to dupe people into believing that they’re indispensable through dollops of vacant psychobabble and cookie cutter clichés masquerading as insight will lead the world to a swift and sniveling conclusion.

When Chancellor Hilda discovers the G7 goodie bags and reveals that they contain suicide pills (“They hand them out at all the summits!”), you kinda wish that sort of swag was a consideration in the real world.

It’s not though and, in short, we may be doomed.

But if our final moments are scripted and directed by Maddin and the Johnsons, at least we’re in for a laugh.

Rumours premiered in Cannes earlier this year and starts its European rollout with the UK and Ireland next week.