RUMOURS is a crude and broad satire which openly mocks the notion of trying to read deeper meaning into its bizarre portrait of feeble world leaders. Guy Maddin’s latest film follows a G7 summit which lurches between banal political inaction and a nonsensical apocalypse. Nevertheless, despite a messy and unfocused narrative trajectory, the depth of absurdity Maddin (and co-directors Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson) offers skewers the modern geopolitical scene better than most.
The film opens on the G7 summit in Germany, hosted by Chancellor (Cate Blanchett) and introduced with an ominous musical score from Kristian Eidnes Andersen, which presents the event with a creeping dread not normally attached to such banal international events of chest puffing. The leaders are shown a local archaeological curio: the Iron Age corpse of someone preserved in a bog in such a way that the body’s tissues are preserved, but it has become limp and boneless. An amusingly crass photo opportunity with one such bog body precedes a bizarre unfurling of the world around the hapless septet of politicians, featuring darkening skies, reanimated self-pleasuring bog people, and hatchback-sized inanimate brains. Throughout these bizarre happenings, the world leaders fruitlessly pursue “a draft of a provisional statement” for an earlier and more garden-variety crisis that prompted the summit, the urgent nature of which is quite deliberately never spelt out.
RUMOURS is a difficult film to provide a synopsis, as any brief summary encourages readings that the film actively rejects and confounds. The film even openly mocks the idea that each leader should be seen as an allegory for their nation by openly having Denis Ménochet’s French premiere posit the idea they could be seen “as personifications of our respective nations”. However, the daft nature of the caricatures – a US President (Charles Dance) with an English accent; an Italian Prime Minister (Rolando Ravello) who stashes cured meat in his pockets – invites a broader, less surgical assessment. These are stupid, messy, confusing, and weak people, and their lack of meaningful action – either because of a lack of ability, lack of commitment, or general mental feebleness – as the world begins to crumble around them is ludicrous. The world leaders sketched out here embody a disturbing lack of insight, even as they attempt to justify their exalted status and privilege of pontification to themselves.
“The world leaders sketched out here embody a disturbing lack of insight, even as they attempt to justify their exalted status and privilege of pontification to themselves.”
The film’s dialogue is frequently deployed with pithily comic impact. Some of the best utterances come from Denis Ménochet as Sylvain, who delivers something “[he] had to share from [his] position in the wheelbarrow” with the perfect blend of solemnity and absurdity required during a reflective moment. Thunderingly obvious jabs such as zombies masturbating over a roaring fire (society outside the political class catches some strays in the film’s scattershot approach to commentary) and speeches delivered profoundly from cobbled-together gibberish notes are funny precisely because of the lack of subtlety.
“Nevertheless, the shaggy dog tale of the leaders traipsing around the German country estate becomes messy and unfocused even by its own standards as the film starts to drag its feet to a conclusion.”
Nevertheless, the shaggy dog tale of the leaders traipsing around the German country estate becomes messy and unfocused even by its own standards as the film starts to drag its feet to a conclusion. A plot mechanism involving a paedophile-entrapping AI chatbot is amusing but attenuates what little coherence the film had. By this late stage, the film starts to run out of juice and largely repeats the same characterisations and observations that came before.
The man-bun-sporting Canadian leader, Laplace (Roy Dupuis), makes multiple references to the words of one of Canada’s greatest lyricists, Neil Young. Laplace laments “it’s better to burn out than to fade away”. However, even if the film doesn’t quite embody that in execution, the pleasures of RUMOURS lie more in its rejection of another lyric from ‘My My, Hey Hey’: that “there’s more to the picture than meets the eye”. Sometimes, highlighting avatars of our world leadership as fragile and banal idiot non-savants is precisely all there is to it. These people are cretins, and we are doomed to listen to meaningless masturbatory rhetoric as the world burns.