One paradox of our current political moment is that, for all its plot twists and dramatic flourishes, it has thus far proven resistant to the cinematic treatment. The tepid response to Ali Abbasi’s Trump biopic The Apprentice, and the outright revulsion toward Michael Moore’s sooner-than-too-soon Trumpsploitation documentary Fahrenheit 11/9, would seem to indicate that Americans, by and large, would rather not hear about That Fucking Guy at the movies (fingers crossed, in a few weeks time we won’t have to hear about him on the news anymore either). The Hunt, which attempted to satirize and literalize the so-called “culture war” head-on, was fucking dreadful; I liked Alex Garland’s Civil War quite a bit more, but it made the wise decision to paint its central conflict in impressionistic terms, instead focusing on the journalists covering it. The trick, then, would seem to be in capturing the vibe of politics circa 2024. The specifics are just too unpleasant to be enjoyable.
It is perhaps fitting, then, that the most satisfying political satire of the year would come from a filmmaking team who don’t seem to be from this planet, let alone have their fingers on the pulse of the headlines. Rumours, from legendary Winnipeg oddball Guy Maddin and frequent collaborators Evan and Galen Johnson, is a profoundly odd film: deeply silly, tonally indescribable, and almost defiantly uninterested in the “whats” of international politics. In other words, it fits the moment to a tee.
The action takes place in a chateau somewhere in the German countryside, where the leaders of the free world have gathered for the annual G7 conference. Present are heads of state from Germany (Cate Blanchett, doing what appears to be a Werner Herzog impression), Canada (Roy Dupuis), the United Kingdom (Nikki Amuka-Bird), France (Denis Ménochet), the United States (Charles Dance, as the most anglophonic US president since Donald Pleasance in Escape from New York), Italy (Rolando Ravello), and Japan (Takehiro Hira). The conference gets off to an unusual start with the discovery of a so-called “bog man” mummy on the premises of the chateau (they know its gender because, as an archaeologist casually notes, his penis has been severed and hung around his neck). After a hilariously cheery photo op with the bog man, the group sets to the important task of crafting a joint provisional statement. Things soon take a turn for the weird, however, first with a series of unexplained howls from the woods, then as seemingly all other human life on earth (or at least the chateau) seemingly vanish into thin air. As night falls and tensions rise, the leaders need to put aside their differences and make their way back to society– if it even still exists.
I am going to emphasize the qualifier in the next sentence, because it’s an important one: for a film directed by Guy Maddin, Rumours is surprisingly normal. Most of Maddin’s best-known films, from Tales from the Gimli Hospital to The Saddest Music in the World, look as if they were discovered in a well on a farm in rural Canada owned by immigrants from a nonexistent country. Rumours, by contrast, has a crisp and clean look; if one were to watch with the sound off, much of it might be mistaken for one of Armando Ianucci’s political TV shows. It at least nominally takes place in something recognizable as the real, modern world, with references to real things which actually exist on our timeline. Broadly speaking, the best point of comparison might be The Dead Don’t Die, Jim Jarmusch’s uncharacteristically silly 2019 all-star zombie comedy. If you weren’t paying attention, you’d swear Maddin was going mainstream.
Of course, around the time our heroes stumble across Alicia Vikander’s president of the European Commission covered in mud and murmuring cryptic prophecies in Swedish while worshiping a gigantic woman’s brain (“It’s slightly smaller than a giant man’s brain,” the French president observes), it becomes clear that we are fully rooted in Maddin/Johnson soil after all. Like the great Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker comedies before them, Johnson-Maddin-Johnson have pulled off the devilish trick of assembling a cast of world-class dramatic actors to read their lunatic screenplay with absolute conviction. The jokes in Rumours– including an inspired chatbot routine and a riotous parody of Bill Pullman’s climactic speech from Independence Day– are very funny, but the magic lies in how adept its actors are at delivering them with deadpan conviction.
Perhaps the funniest joke in Rumours, which takes the form of an of-the-moment political satire, is that it does not seem particularly interested in, or knowledgeable of, politics. The world leaders occasionally discuss bits of historical G7 trivia as if they were sports statistics, but all of it sounds like it was plucked from Wikipedia. They are all very concerned with crafting their provisional statement, but they can’t agree on what it should entail, or even what a “provisional statement” is; Dupuis’ Canadian prime minister wants it to include a lengthy passage on the respective sacrifices men and women can expect to make in a long-term relationship, while Dance’s American president scoffs at the idea that the statement should include any substance at all. At times, the movie itself seems to mock the idea that it should be a satire; when the French president exclaims, “What if we all represent our respective countries!” his colleagues dismiss him out of hand.
Still, there is that sense that there is some sort of larger point. When the president of the United States collapses and tells the other countries that they’ll need to find a way to go forward without him, one senses he’s echoing thoughts the apprehensions of the denizens of other countries regarding America’s place in the world (for that matter, there is a more than passing resemblance between Dance’s doddering president and our own). Later, the enfeebled president of France remarks how comfortable he feels being carried in the strong arms of Canada. For that matter, Dupuis’ Canadian PM– a hunky, brooding, silver-fox himbo– is a hilariously self-aggrandizing representation of the filmmakers’ home country, the latest incarnation of Maddin’s trademark wry, quasi-mythological version of the Great White North.
But, again, Rumours isn’t a film about politics, not really. It’s a film about shuffling bog-mummies furiously masturbating in the moonlight; about endless, Buñuelian discussions about whether or not characters should leave a gazebo; about the practicalities of building the world’s largest sundial. It is, in short, a very odd movie (if, again, relatively restrained by the filmmakers’ standards). I suspect those who don’t jive with it will be very, very not into it, but I found myself drawn into its cockeyed view of world relations. Is there a point to all of it? Who knows– but then, one could ask the same question about real-world politics in 2024.
Rumours
2024
dir. Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, & Galen Johnson
103 min.
Opens Friday, 10/18 @ Kendall Square Cinema, Alamo Drafthouse Seaport, and AMC Boston Common
