The strangest thing about Guy Maddin’s Rumours, co-directed with frequent collaborators Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, might just be how relatively ordinary it feels. Eschewing the primitive style for which the Winnipeg filmmaker developed a following, as well as the nesting-doll structure of The Forbidden Room, his latest stages its genre-inflected political satire—one that’s equal parts Luis Buñuel and John Carpenter—in a surprisingly straightforward fashion. Maybe that’s because, despite still featuring a host of odd sights like a giant glowing brain in the woods, the film’s timely subject matter and heightened and portentous atmosphere reflects reality in an all too down-to-earth manner.
Rumours is set at a G7 summit, that oft-protested gathering of leaders of some of the world’s wealthiest democracies, during which they put on a show of global unity, if nothing else, given the summit’s lack of verifiable, concrete, real-life outcomes. Hosted by a fictional German chancellor, Hilda Orlmann (Cate Blanchett), at a woodsy estate, the participants are ostensibly there to draft a provisional statement regarding an unnamed world crisis. But as they wander the grounds with their assistants and dip into the abundant buffets that have been laid out for their enjoyment, it becomes instantly apparent that these prosperous individuals are mostly here to catch up with one another as if they were attending an opulent high school reunion.
A mood of gleeful absurdism slowly sets in as the leaders sit down at a table under a gazebo and leisurely attempt to get to work, but their attentions quickly stray away to trivial concerns, if they’re not wandering off from the others altogether. For instance, the Canadian prime minister, Maxime Laplace (Roy Dupuis), a certified ladies’ man conspicuously modeled after Pierre Trudeau, is caught up in some private emotional turmoil, trying to rekindle old romantic flames with the U.K.’s leader, Cardosa Dewindt (Nikki Amuka-Bird), but eventually disappearing with Hilda for a quick tryst in the woods. Meanwhile, U.S. President Edison Wolcott, amusingly played by a very British-accented Charles Dance, mostly wants to go to sleep.
It’s abundantly clear from the start that not much in the way of actual work is going to be accomplished at this lightly surreal G7 summit, and the film’s skewering of the uselessness of politicians in our turbulent modern world goes into full comic overdrive once an explicitly apocalyptic event occurs. Everyone but the leaders suddenly vanish and the group proceeds to futilely attempt to find their way off the estate while trying to avoid running into the creepy bog people (or are they protestors?) that have begun to pop up on the premises.
Soon Rumours is knowingly playing with horror tropes, with the besieged world leaders resembling the clueless victims from any number of run-of-the-mill slasher flicks from the 1980s, their reactions fluctuating between panic, despair, and blasé exhaustion. (And through it all, Wolcott is simply happy to be left behind for dead so that he can finally rest a bit.) If, by this point, it starts to feel as if the film is stuck spinning its wheels, that serves as an apt metaphor for the reluctance of our leaders to make any clear decisions in the face of a crisis.
At times, it feels like the entire scenario is a pretext for sustained humor, and the triumph of the film on that front is a scene in which Laplace suddenly receives a series of text messages from an unknown young girl, who the group suspects of being part of a newly installed pedophile-catching program. Seeing this as a potential way of escape if authorities are alerted, the group bickers about how to inappropriately solicit the girl to raise red flags, but in a way that’s not too lewd, so that, if it is a real girl on the other end, they don’t irreparably traumatize her.
Rumours is defined by its peculiar admixture of national pride and self-deprecation. With that in mind, Laplace emerges as the film’s most compelling character, bringing its core thesis into sharp focus. Given his pre-political history as a street-level protestor, as well as Canada’s position as the newest inductee into the G7, he’s established as someone with his feet on both sides of the class divide, and therefore capable of extending empathy toward others or simply exercising some measure of determination. Yet even though he initially emerges within this outlandish situation as something of a de facto action hero who will lead the other hopeless politicos to safety, Laplace eventually proves to be as ineffectual as his colleagues.
At the film’s conclusion, it falls on Laplace to deliver the group’s provisional statement to the encroaching bog people. Performed with all the chintzy bombastic patriotism of those ubiquitous “I Am Canadian!” Molson beer ads from the ’90s, though, the statement turns out to just be a ludicrous collection of inconsequential decrees that solve nothing at all, laying bare the reality that no matter how “authentic” one’s background or intentions are, entering the political realm means becoming unavoidably swept up in empty rhetoric. The apocalyptic endpoint that Rumours imagines may be a farcical fantasy on the surface, but the way the world’s leaders are prone to getting lost in the wilderness while the rest of us are annihilated by transparently immediate concerns is something that the film traces with chillingly droll precision.
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