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DIRECTED BY: Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson
FEATURING: Roy Dupuis, Cate Blanchett, Denis Ménochet, Charles Dance, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Rolando Ravello, Takehiro Hira, Alicia Vikander
PLOT: G7 leaders gather at a conference to write a statement on an unspecified crisis; everyone else suddenly disappears, leaving the leaders stranded in the woods with masturbating zombie bog-men and a giant brain.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Ever since seeing the pre-release still of the giant brain in the forest with ivy growing on it, we knew Rumours was going to be weird. While the cast and budget may be bigger than usual, Guy Maddin proves he is no sellout, and the rumo(u)rs are all true: the movie does not disappoint in the oddness department.
COMMENTS: Seeing a Guy Maddin (well, a Maddin and the Johnsons) movie with known actors in an actual AMC theater is, in itself, a surreal experience. The fact that I was not the only one there was even stranger. Although it would be nice for other local Maddin fans to get a chance to come out and catch Rumours on a big screen—there must be at least one or two others in a metro area of one million souls—I was halfway hoping that the five other patrons had wandered in unsuspecting, lured by Cate Blanchett’s name on the marquee, and, like hapless G7 leaders, were about to be blindsided by a strangeness they could never have foreseen.
To be fair, it takes a while for it to sink in that this is a Maddin movie. There’s no homage to a particular cinematic era—the movie instead is a stylistic melange of soft focus, lavender lighting, and melodramatic musical cues, shot in academy ratio—and the broad political satire is far away from Maddin’s typical Freudian introspection. Perhaps this shows the influence of screenwriter and co-director Evan Johnson and third co-director Galen Johnson steering Maddin away from his usual fallbacks. But soon enough the absurd sense of humor reminds us that we are, indeed, watching a Maddin film. (My favorite joke may be when the French Prime Minister explains that the giant brain in the forest must be a woman’s, because it is “slightly smaller than a man’s giant brain.”)
Satirically, the movie is obvious rather than incisive, earning its laughs from its absurdities, not its relevancies. The G7 leaders have assembled to address a crisis they never get around to defining, instead meeting in small groups to draft statements that are made up of half boilerplate, half non-sequitur (items like the display of non-sexual physical affection within marriage make it into the statement, along with nonsense the American president mutters while talking in his sleep). The characterizations of the ineffectual statesmen and women are, to say the least, unflattering: the Italian Prime Minister does little but offer his companions lunch meat. In a ironic nation-deprecating joke, the most dynamic of the seven is the Canadian: he’s a horndog in a man-bun with a weakness for strong women, who has, or will, sleep with the entire female cast. But don’t do as the French Prime Minister explicitly suggests and look for symbolism in the leaders’ characters. Instead, embrace the UK’s atypical astute response when P.M. Broulez asks, “what does it mean that Canada is faster than Germany?” “Nothing!” It’s not specific shots at the political order, but the dreamlike elements of the masturbating bog-men, the giant forest cerebrum, and the treacherous A.I. chatbot that hit hardest in Rumours. We don’t know what has caused the apocalypse, or even if it is an apocalypse; all we know is that the world’s leaders are spectacularly unequipped to save us all from whatever weirdness is slouching towards the summit.
The relatively big exposure of Rumours made me slightly afraid that Maddin might have gone (slightly) mainstream. My fears were assuaged when the credits rolled and the five other people in the theater all started loudly complaining to each other: “That made no sense at all!” “That was terrible!” “I wanted to leave but I just thought it had to get better!” “Who did Cate Blanchett owe money to?” They may have hated it, but odds are they would think about what they had seen later, and would never entirely forget the bizarre experience. It’s a response that I like to think would have had Maddin and the Johnsons chuckling. It certainly had me chuckling.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
