Rumours

The leaders of the mightiest nations on Earth are lost and helpless in the face of a bizarre, apocalyptic crisis - Statement of fact or a weird, dark, satirical fairy tale? The answer is yes.

First of all, if you’re looking for a review of the 1977 Fleetwood Mac album, you’ve come to the wrong place.

Second, if you’re feeling at all anxious or sensitive about the current state of world affairs at this particular time — can’t imagine why you would be — “Rumours” may not be the movie for you right now. On the other hand, the very things that drew me to this film are the sources of anxiety about global politics, and how the publicity for “Rumors” promised to present them in a funhouse mirror for our amusement. I’ve long admired the kind of off-the-wall satire and bleak, black comedy of “Doctor Strangelove,” “Network,” and “Fight Club” – so when I saw the bizarre imagery on offer in “Rumours,” particularly the image of a gigantic brain in the middle of a forest, I hoped it would be an opportunity to sample something in that vein. 

The result is something stranger still: “Rumours” makes these films by comparison look grounded and realistic. This outlandish political satire has more in common with the absurdism of a playwright like Eugène Ionesco, casting the world’s most powerful leaders as clueless wanderers in a grotesque, dreamlike, and sometimes allegorical fairy-tale wilderness.

The woods in fairy and folktales is a liminal space. In it, our deepest fears reside and our inhibitions come crashing down dangerously. It is into this that our filmmakers Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson send not a band of adventurers but the leaders of the G7 nations, the elite club of the wealthiest liberal democracies in the world. Here they will come face to face with their own embarrassing personality quirks, but most importantly, the ugliest truth about themselves: that they are helpless, hapless, and clueless in the face of a crisis. Meanwhile, they somehow still have to project an image of competence to a world outside that (they think) is counting on them. 

The setting is the periodic G7 summit, taking place this year at a resort in Germany, where the heads of state of the member nations – namely Germany, Italy, France, the UK, the USA, Canada, and Japan – are confronting an unspecified global “crisis.” What this is, they can’t say – and I do mean that literally, as they are simply unable to articulate anything beyond jargon-laced generalities as they try to describe it, even to each other. It’s an “emergency” of a possibly world-altering nature, to which they urgently need to form a coordinated response, and compose a statement to the world to showcase their readiness to confront it. They will prove entirely inadequate to the task.

Before they get down to business, they take a moment for an unusual photo op with a recent archaeological discovery — an Iron Age corpse preserved as a gruesome, spongy mummy in a peat bog, such as have been found in many places in northern Europe. They share a collective shudder as it’s disclosed that at many of these sites, the bodies appear to have been those of chieftains or other leaders who were killed and mutilated for failing to deliver on their promises.

When it comes time to compose their official statement, they retire to a gazebo on the premises of the picturesque chateau to begin a “working dinner” — at which they all wipe their mouths and hands on napkins decorated as the flags of their respective countries, one of many not-exactly-subtle but hilarious details of design. At some point, they discover that they are all alone — or at least that no one comes when they call; they don’t seem particularly interested in exploring that matter further, busy as they are coming up with half-baked drafts of their all-important statement. Isolated, tired, and punchy, they find themselves confronting an ever-stranger series of events that eventually draws them all into the woods, where they become hopelessly lost. 

The perils they face in the woods may be real or imagined, supernatural or banal — one way or the other, these leaders are at a loss as to how even to describe what they see and encounter. They have no language other than platitudes and vague quotations, no context other than the arena of policy and politics. They may or may not be surrounded by the zombie-like forms of many more leathery bog corpses, haunting them with the spirits of failed leaders of the past, but they can only imagine that they might be “protestors.” (In one critical scene, the mysterious bog people seem to be doing something else altogether, which I’ll only say reminded me of the opening of Mel Brooks’ “History of the World, Part One.”) The aforementioned giant brain in the forest might be a real brain, might be some kind of outlandish objet d’art, or it might be a message from some new international coalition of technology and industry. They simply don’t have the language to describe it.

Our cast of characters sometimes evokes actual world leaders of these nations. Certainly the wardrobe choices of German Chancellor Hilda Orlmann (Cate Blanchett) echo the fussy pantsuits and unfashionable coiffure of Angela Merkel. Roy Dupuis as Canadian PM Maxime Laplace cuts a dashing figure, with an animal magnetism that the women of the group can’t resist, and it’s hard not to think of the near-hearthrob status that Justin Trudeau achieved early in his tenure in the real job.

More often than not, though, these characters embody the character and flaws of their nations themselves — the President of France (Denis Ménochet) is long-winded and preoccupied with history and symbolism. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (Nikki Amuka-Bird) is a ball of anxiety barely masked by desperate politeness. Edison Wolcott, the President of the United States (Charles Dance) is an elderly and vain man, out of touch and fading into irrelevancy. The PM of Japan (Takehiro Hira) is mostly ignored until he can be useful. And so on.

(Dance, who is of course British, intentionally makes no attempt to play the role with an American accent, the reason for which is hinted at but never explained. It’s sort of like Igor’s hump in “Young Frankenstein.” I thought this was a telling detail of the sort of comedy we are dealing with. And for those keeping score at home, yes, that’s two Mel Brooks references I’ve made in this review, though I have to say that “Rumours” is of a very different breed of satire than Brooks.)

“Rumours” is hard to describe in retrospect, in the same way that dreams can be hard to summarize upon waking. It exists in a world all its own, sealed away from tangible reality. I suppose this is part of the point, too, as our leaders are surrounded on all sides by what may be some kind of “apocalyptic” event, but are locked in their own all-consuming crises in the woods and can’t do anything about it. They meander through all these dangers and stumble to the conclusion of their own story, and seem to end with their own kind of triumph, but it is probably utterly meaningless in the face of whatever has obliterated the world around them. Their real goal was never to do something about the mysterious problem, but to find something to say about it.

I’ll refrain from offering too many more details of the plot, not that there’s necessarily anything critical to “spoil” per se, but because each of its absurd developments is probably best discovered for maximum surprise and comic impact. “Rumours” carefully treads a gossamer-thin line between outright camp and straight-ahead realistic satire, which takes extraordinary discipline and skill from the cast especially. It’s incredibly difficult to deliver ridiculous dialogue straight, but if any of these performances tipped too far in either direction, the whole film would come crashing down like a house of cards (another wholly different political satire). Astonishingly, they stay right on target.

Of special merit among the cast are Cate Blanchett, whose Hilda is deprived of the veneer of competence on which she has hung her whole identity — Blanchett’s eyes betray a woman constantly on the edge of sheer panic. Roy Dupuis delivers a smolder worthy of a cologne ad as Maxime preens and broods theatrically. Denis Ménochet is perhaps the most fervently committed to the nonsense, as wrapped up in his own apocalyptic flights of fancy as Dr. Strangelove once was in his rhapsody on breeding in fallout shelters. Also, Alicia Vikander is weirdly gripping in a guest role as the head of the European Commission. She delivers not a single line in English, as she’s a kind of cryptic prophet who seems to be speaking in tongues (though it turns out just to be Swedish).

The directors, along with cinematographer Stefan Ciupek and production designer Zosia Mackenzie, deliver a lurid, surreal, fantastical landscape awash with garish color for “Rumours.” The lighting of the film seems more appropriate to an opera performance than a drama about the G7; whole scenes are brightly lit from odd angles in purple or scarlet, or at times black-and-white, depending on which character’s point of view is dominant. Meanwhile, Kristian Eidnes Andersen’s original music is similarly overblown, hovering over the proceedings like a gargoyle presiding over a city from a Gothic cathedral. Some deliberate incursions of other music punctuate particularly melodramatic moments, such as repeated quotations of Ottorino Respighi’s orchestral tone poem “Pines of Rome,” and at one point, even an Enya song arrives to swirl romantically around Maxime. Nutty as it is, it’s all done as deadly serious as possible, which of course is what makes it funny.

Ultimately, “Rumours” lands a fairly bleak message that our world’s problems are utterly beyond those who presume to lead us. How strongly and effectively that lands is sometimes unclear, as is the filmmakers’ opinion of what we ought to do about it. But “Rumours” represents the kind of wild, experimental, and distinctive filmmaking that doesn’t often make it to theatrical release anymore, and deserves to be seen if only because — or especially because — I guarantee you have not ever seen anything quite like it.