Guy Maddin’s ‘Rumours’ Mocks Global Power Players With Surreal Antics

Alci Rengifo

Our global leaders would be quite farcical if their policies weren’t so consequential to the planet’s health. “Rumours” takes aim at the G7, gathering together fictional takes on the world’s heads of state to then strip them down to their quirky, tragically useless selves. It could most definitely punch harder. Yet, it’s a surreal romp that brings home the key theme that we are ruled by mere fellow humans. If you take seriously the Socratic idea of knowing thyself, then that’s all you need to understand what power does to flawed individuals. Three directors are credited, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson and Guy Maddin. Maddin is the most famous of the trio, as a Canadian auteur whose films are wild visual wonders that feel pulled out of silent movie dreamscapes. 

Maddin, Evan and Galen Johnson this time do away with their trademark aesthetic, settling for a more traditional satirical style. The premise is a simple play on the kind of surrealist stories someone like Luis Buñuel (one of Maddin’s idols) would conjure. The G7 conference is underway and seven world leaders have gathered to meet a chateau that turns out to be mysteriously abandoned. They are the usual suspects who run the world order. Hilda Orlmann (Cate Blanchett) is the German Chancellor. From the UK, we get Prime Minister Cardosa Dewindt (Nikki Amuka-Bird). Sylvain Broulez (Denis Ménochet) is president of France. Tatsuro Iwasaki (Takehiro Hira) represents Japan. Antonio Lamorle (Rolando Ravello) is the Italian Prime Minister and Maxime Laplace (Roy Dupuis) holds the same office in Canada. Of course, there is the President of the United States, Edison Wolcott (Charles Dance). As their confusion over the locale deepens, odd behaviors begin to take over, from unrequited love to obsessing over nonsense.

“We’re a bit of a G7 ourselves. We’re this insular group who try to solve problems (laughs). So we felt an affinity with them,” Evan Johnson tells Entertainment Voice about the trio behind the movie. “Of course, like most people we have a massive irritation and disrespect with these people for failing to solve the problems we’ve elected them to solve.” That feeling of disdain combines with sarcastic forms of empathy. “Rumours” doesn’t portray these fictional takes on our rulers as monsters, more like fragile buffoons who are closed off from the masses. They have personal dramas going on akin to high school. Canada’s Laplace, an obvious riff of Justin Trudeau’s image as a photogenic head of state, can’t get over the fling he had at a past conference with the UK’s Dewindt, who is not interested in rekindling the spark. Germany’s Orlmann lusts after Laplace like a sexually frustrated Angela Merkel. U.S. President Wolcott is clearly modeled on Joe Biden in look and mannerisms, seeming too tired to even flex his power over anything going on.

The excavation of an ancient Iron Age mummified corpse begins to fuel even more surreal developments when zombie-like figures begin to roam the woods, keeping the global leaders scared and entrapped. “We have these depictions of these leaders on the news where they are very far away, not close enough to hear, moving in these super congenial choreographies, introducing each other to their spouses, instantly getting off with each other, I mean hitting it off,” says Maddin. “The three of us are Buñuelians in the way he would have a lite touch on these people we assume he hates. He ends up kind of loving his targets. Visually, this script didn’t call for archaic vocabularies.” By not employing the visual pyrotechnics of films like their stunning “The Forbidden Room,” the directors let the farcically tragic performances dominate. As Maddin says, we are turned off by the powerful yet pity this bunch. Iwasaki and Broulez bond over a quirky obsession with speeches. Lamorle is quick to comment on everything and admits to feeling bad about a scandal where he dressed like Benito Mussolini. 

As the zombies continue to haunt the politicians, at times getting caught masturbating around a campfire, the leaders struggle to draft a statement to respond to an unexplained, yet clearly apocalyptic, world crisis. Here “Rumours” hits some of its best strides in capturing how inept this bunch of supposed brains is when it comes to formulating a simple response. A pair prefers to run off and find a spot to have sex. Others get lost in nostalgic memories. Even if the movie lacks the fury of something like “Don’t Look Up” or “The Death of Stalin,” it still has an unnerving undercurrent. After a year of non-stop war in the Middle East, natural disasters and war in Eastern Europe, during which no one can impose a ceasefire, it’s more frightening to contemplate how disconnected or fragile the people on top can be. There is another side to it, which the film never touches upon, which is also the cynical, violent interests of any state when it comes to self-preservation, but “Rumours” is about the intimate lives hiding behind the power.

“Rumours” will occasionally dabble in some of the hallucinatory imagery these directors are known for, including the mysterious appearance of a giant brain in the woods, which is an image recycled from “The Forbidden Room.” Alicia Vikander appears as a mystery woman who might hold the key to getting out. The comedy bites when it plays with getting edgy, as when the leaders try to text for help but might have to use a pedophile monitoring system. All of it culminates, most appropriately, with a masturbating zombie and a fiery finale that is the film’s most clear statement on where our rulers are dragging us to. It would be nice to think “Rumours” is a film for the here and now, yet we can easily assume it will stay relevant for a long time. “No matter how you present these leaders together, the audience will project its feelings about them onto the screen,” says Galen Johnson. “That was a motivation that made it easy to create this scenario.”

“Rumours” releases Oct. 18 in select theaters.