Stream It Or Skip It?
The premise of Rumours (now streaming on Paramount+) sounds like a joke setup: Seven politicians get lost in the woods; one’s German, one’s Italian, one’s – well, you get it. Renowned Canadian auteur Guy Maddin and frequent collaborators Galen Johnson and Evan Johnson co-direct this political farce/satire/allegory set at the G7 conference, and led by Cate Blanchett as a galaxy-brained German chancellor hosting the event, which turns into a meandering and deeply strange post-apocalyptic survival situation involving zombielike creatures, a giant brain in the forest and – gasp! – Alicia Vikander speaking, of all things, Swedish. Whether any of this means anything on a literal or symbolic level is left for us to decide, I guess, although I feel like hopeless political wonks will get the most out of it.
RUMOURS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: THE G7 CONFERENCE: You know, the annual gathering of the top elected leaders from seven of the strongest democratic nations so they may solve all the world’s problems. Please feel free to take any commentary on its effectiveness or problematic membership off the air, thank you. This one, the one in the movie, is set in Germany, hosted by Chancellor Hilda Ortmann (Blanchett), who made sure a lovely gazebo was built so she and her esteemed guests could have a lovely outdoor dinner, during which they’ll collaborate on a supremely important “provisional statement addressing the present crisis.” What, exactly, is this “present crisis”? Not sure. But on the way to dinner, the seven leaders stroll past a muddy hole in the ground where an archaeologist shows them a “bog body,” an ancient mummified human being whose bones have melted due to a specific environmental situation the details of which I glazed over, perhaps because the mummy’s penis had been chopped off and hung around its neck like a pendant. Being the egocentric paranoiac mush-for-brains leaders of the free world, they of course immediately theorize that the “bog body” was its people’s leader, punished in vile fashion by disgruntled constituents. Seems plausible!
The cast: U.S. president Edison Wolcott (Charles Dance), a feeble old codger and spontaneous napper. French president Sylvain Broulez (Denis Menochet) is a flimsy coward not unlike the stereotype of his people. Italian Prime Minister Antonio Lamorte (Rolando Rovello) is a buffoon with a pocketful of meat, for reasons that may be symbolic, or maybe it’s just silly. Japanese Prime Minister Tatsuro Iwasaki (Takehiro Hira) is quiet and reserved. Canadian Prime Minister Maxime Laplace (Roy Dupuis) is a brooding manbunned ladykiller who once had a dalliance with another attendee, U.K. Prime Minister Cardosa Dewindt (Nikki Amuka-Bird), who may be the one G7 member who isn’t quite a hopeless dolt. As for Hilda, well, it seems she’d rather be the one on the other end of Maxime’s rogering.
Give these pinheads credit for trying to stay on task, re: this “provisional statement,” which I’m sure will solve all the problems pertaining to “the present crisis.” If they can just assemble all the right meaningless words to say nothing at all, this issue will surely be solved. But a gust of wind takes Sylvain’s notes into the woods, and he follows, and we wait a bit, and he returns, splattered with mud, because he says he was attacked by a bog body and now he feels like his leg bone is melting, thus requiring the group to push him around in a wheelbarrow while they wander through the woods (I think that’s a metaphor) and run into some masturbating bog bodies and a couple of gibberish-spouting Euro leaders (Vikander, Zlatko Buric), and end up right back in the same place where they started (yep, totally a metaphor).
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Maddin and co. find a sweet spot between the vicious satire of The Death of Stalin and the dopey whimsy of Jim Jarmusch’s light zom-com The Dead Don’t Die.
Performance Worth Watching: Take your pick of these two-thirds-formed performances that hinge on a goofy trait or two – Blanchett’s amusing German accent, Dance’s blend of Bidenesque sleepiness and gross American hubris, or Dupuis’ ridiculous soap-opera brooding.
Memorable Dialogue: Our braintrust theorizes what’s happening to them:
Cardosa: We were attacked by dark, shadowy figures!
Hilda: Protestors!
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: As an allegory, Rumours might be more effective with audiences who torture themselves by following the ins and outs of global politics, and therefore will catch the nuanced references that I felt zinging over my head like Cruise hitting Mach 10. For the rest of us, it’s perhaps best taken as a surreal lark that employs a little Lynchian dream-state nonsense as it throws jokes – some sophisticated, some not even in the same existential realm as sophistication – at the wall and see what sticks. Either way, Maddin and the Johnson Bros. make sure there’s enough general intent and purpose to the material so it transcends simplistic silliness, at least a little.
The film only teases what’s happening in the world to inspire the mediumweight mayhem of this story – our unheroes blither on about AI chatbots that hunt pedophiles and somethingsomething climate change as they throw together buzzy phrases for their bullshit statement that’ll accomplish f—all. At one point, smoke rises on the horizon. The film foregoes the usual breathless searches for fellow survivors at military checkpoints and zombiefight action of post-apocalyptic thrillers and sticks with how it believes a group of high-profile pols would react to the situation without advisers and handlers surrounding them; most amusingly, they seem perfectly fine with existing in a vague, hazy place where solid answers to legitimate questions will never, ever be reached.
Honestly, the soul-numbing state of current affairs (scads of which have manifested since Rumours debuted at Cannes 2024) found me latching onto the film’s sillier components – the gobbledybargle of the characters’ vocabularies and the occasional dopey witticisms, e.g., “Antonio has been sharing his meats!” or the Vikander character expressing her state of physical exhaustion as “I’m having an energy crisis.” Maddin and co. also land on a climactic punchline that resolves the main conflict in a rather funny fashion, that conflict being, of course, the drafting of the “provisional statement,” two words that grew to make less and less sense as the movie went on. In other words, you get out of the film whatever effort you choose to put into it.
Our Call: Rumours rummages around in the type of weirdness and esoterica that likely limits its appeal to weird, esoteric viewers. I found it a functional means of laughing at the current state of democratic nations, because any other analysis of the topic is just depressing. So STREAM IT for a bit of levity among the reigning chaos.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
