Into the woods Guy Maddin's absurdist end-of-the-world satire Rumours a real trip By: Alison Gillmor Posted: 4:38 PM CDT Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024

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This fabulously hard-to-classify film — primal horror? wacky ensemble comedy? avant-garde soap opera? — combines the made-in-Manitoba directorial team of Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson with a roster of big international stars that includes Oscar winners Cate Blanchett and Alicia Vikander.

Since its première in May at Cannes, some media outlets have been describing Rumours as “mainstream Maddin.” And while that designation might overstate the case — you can still expect plenty of orotund dialogue and obscure film references, along with a giant glowing brain — in its own idiosyncratic and absurdist way, this G7-gone-wild saga does feel accessible.

With a mix of righteous satirical rage and pitch-dark, pancake-flat mirth, Maddin and the Johnson brothers have made the end of the world eminently watchable.

Rumours starts with a moment of seeming normality at the G7 summit. But what does “normality” really mean when the leaders of the world’s wealthiest countries, meeting at a historic chateau on the edge of a German forest, smile for official photographs while knowing the Earth is on the brink of some unspecified catastrophe?

The seven leaders’ response to this global threat — which is only ever identified as “the present crisis” — seems rather blithe, so it’s weirdly pleasurable to watch how fraught things become when the problem suddenly becomes personal to them.

One moment, the gang — which includes Blanchett as the German chancellor, Nikki Amuka-Bird as the British prime minister, Charles Dance as the American president and Roy Dupuis as Canada’s own PM — is sharing an elegant meal under the neo-classical dome of an open-air folly.

The next moment they realize they have been abandoned by security and staff. No more circling helicopters, no more black-suited people talking into their mics.

Even worse, there is no one manning the chafing dishes.

Now the leaders of Canada, the U.S. the U.K., Germany, Japan (Takehiro Hira), France (Denis Menochet) and Italy (Rolando Ravello) are drawn into a primeval Saxony forest, often lit with lurid reds and green lights, trying to make their way back to the possible, provisional safety of the nearby chateau.

All the while, the group is stalked by … something. Temporary relief that it’s not protesters gives way to something more unsettling when they discover they are being trailed by reanimated Iron Age bog bodies.

At this point, Evan Johnson’s script jams together oozy, icky folk horror and savage comedy. As Hilda, the German chancellor, has explained, many of the bog bodies were leaders sacrificially tortured and murdered by their own people to bring about a good harvest. One particularly discomfiting example has his own severed penis wrapped around his neck.

These present-day leaders are likewise politically neutered. Even as they wander lost in the woods, they continue their attempts to craft a policy statement — which needs to be clear, it’s suggested, but not so clear they’re committed to actually doing anything.

This discourse about democracy, the rule of law, the multilateral order and the need for “a searching and productive exchange of views” eventually descends into complete bureaucratic gibberish.

That severed penis also alludes to the group’s fevered Freudian crosscurrents of sexual frustration — never far away in Maddin’s oeuvre — much of it swirling round the Canadian PM. This silver-tressed hottie is currently distracted — not by the potential end of the world, of course, but by his own erotic entanglements, as well as a political scandal so dull and Canadian as to baffle the Italian PM, who’s accustomed to much more titillating tabloid headlines.

Maddin has always worked with terrific acting talent — local, national and international — and this starry cast gives great value. After some meta-conversation about whether the seven leaders can be seen as personifications of their respective nations, we see the actors crafting performances that are parodic but also personal, committed and adorably odd.

Blanchett commands the screen, as she always does, as the bossy chancellor with buried yearnings. Dance plays the American president as an autocratic, arrogant patrician with an accent we might charitably call “mid-Atlantic.” Vikander, as leader of the EU, makes a wacky drop-in, offering dire poetic prophecies in Swedish.

There are chronic Maddin motifs, going all the way back to the auteur’s cataclysm-obsessed Winnipeg cable access show Survival! There are the shadows and fog of German Expressionism in the evocative nocturnal shots, but also stirrings of ‘50s melodrama, a hint of prime-time ‘80s soaps such as Dynasty and Dallas (though that could just be Blanchett’s hair) and possibly just a whiff of The Poseidon Adventure.

These cinematic riffs are signalled by Kristian Eidnes Andersen’s score, which often plays for broad comic intent.

Though the film does lag a bit in the middle, it always retains an idiosyncratic appeal. As a satire on political ineptitude, Rumours is unusually freaky and spooky. As an elegy for our doomed world, it’s unexpectedly cheerful.

And while the Johnsons and Maddin may be taking to the international stage, the film ends with an affectionate hometown shoutout (by way of some lyrics by onetime Winnipegger Neil Young).

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca

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Alison Gillmor
Writer

Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto’s York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian. She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992.

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