Cinema from the Spectrum

There aren’t many filmmakers out there quite like Guy Maddin, for no one matches his own idiosyncrasies and overt love of classic cinema quite like what he presents. It only makes him a very fitting candidate to make a satire about the current political situation that our world is enduring right now, by placing people of power into a situation that they could not possibly imagine for themselves. But at the same time, you can’t help but think to yourself while watching it all unfold in Rumours, wouldn’t this sort of situation do everything it can to make people regain their interest in voting, by reducing them to humanistic instincts so that they’re much like us after all? It’s an interesting conceit, as we’re shown in here.

Rumours is a film about a group of world leaders who plan to meet at the G7 in order to prepare a joint statement addressing a global crisis that we’re not seeing. We don’t need to see it, we just know that something is going terribly wrong in this world around them, as Guy Maddin and the Johnsons would insinuate. Hilda Ortmann (Cate Blanchett), the Chancellor of Germany, leads the way for everyone, including: US President Edison Wolcott (Charles Dance), Canadian PM Maxime Laplace (Roy Dupuis), French President Sylvain Broulez (Denis Ménochet), UK Prime Minister Cardosa Dewindt (Nikki Amuka-Bird), Italian PM Antonio Lamorte (Rolando Ravello), and Japanese PM Tatsuro Iwasaki (Takehiro Hira). Eventually, they all get lost in the woods and hijinks ensue.

Essentially, this movie is built around the conceit that a group of world leaders are made to survive for your typical horror movie scenario. And in that entire conceit, you’ll find some of the year’s funniest scenes coming about in Rumours. The film isn’t holding back, especially with nailing down the attitudes that politicians can exhibit over the general population – but there’s also a very simple core present to nailing down the film’s unique sense of humour. It all stems from the fact that these world leaders don’t even care about their own people as much as they do themselves and the people who voted them in power. Which is a very obvious setup, but it’s still funny nonetheless.

As many would expect from Maddin’s own films, the look of Rumours is very much informed by that of classic cinema. In the earlier and most beloved of his own works, you can get a sense of how Guy Maddin adopts the aesthetics of classic cinema in order to allow viewers another lens upon which they can approach his own work and ultimately how he sees the world. In the crafting of a horror movie scenario, everything is fun and games after all: he’s playing around with the idea that these world leaders see themselves in a scenario akin to Night of the Living Dead. It’s really funny, but it allows Maddin the means of showing you how every world leader feels about the people they’re meant to rule over. There’s also a lot of very bizarre set pieces coming forth as a result, including that of a massive brain which can only be explained within the proper context of its scene.

Even then, I think that while it’s funny seeing these extreme caricatures of world leaders live a scenario that no one would ever imagine they could go through, there comes a point where it all starts to lose steam. It’s not because of the actors, whose performances are all very good, nor is it on Guy Maddin and the Johnsons, who I think are brilliant at what they do. But Rumours seems like it’s only going for the obvious routes in ways that never really pay off. While the film never really loses track of how funny the whole conceit is, it unfortunately just seems to get lost, together with its own characters in whatever it wants to say – by the end of it all, it feels only very barely coherent in whom it’s pointing its guns at.

But I guess that might just be the magic of someone like Guy Maddin. There’s no one else out there like him, and he’s simply one of the most idiosyncratic filmmakers you’ll ever get working right now. I think as far as his features go, something like Rumours might prove far more accessible than My Winnipeg or Archangel. Yet I think that even where it seems like everything seems to be in order for him, that’s also where I don’t think he knows where exactly he wants to go with Rumours. It’s very funny, but even by the end of it all, I still found myself struggling trying to make something out of what he was trying to convey beyond the obvious. For I know Guy Maddin can go beyond just that at his best.

Watch the trailer right here.

All images via Elevation Pictures.

Directed by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson
Screenplay by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson
Produced by Liz Jarvis, Lars Knudsen, Philipp Kreuzer
Starring Cate Blanchett, Alicia Vikander, Charles Dance, Roy Dupuis, Denis Ménochet, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Rolando Ravello, Takehiro Hira, Zlatko Burić
Premiere Date: May 18, 2024 (Cannes)
Running Time: 118 minutes