RUMOURS - Mark Reviews Movies

Rumours, Bleecker Street

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 17, 2024

Taking an obvious but funny premise into the realms of the repetitive and downright weird, Rumours outstays its welcome. It is a welcome satire at first, to be sure, as the directing team of Guy Maddin and brothers Evan and Galen Johnson take on a group of seven feckless world leaders. They put on a good show of wanting to work together to solve some unnamed global crisis, but soon enough, no one's around to watch their little performance. That doesn't stop them, because it's all they know what to do.

There's another crisis for the leaders at the G7 to face, although facing it isn't exactly how they react to becoming stranded in nature and dealing with the expected challenges, as well as some very unexpected ones. No, these seven try to run away, hide, and look for aid from anyone else, while they still try to put together the draft for a provisional statement about whatever the initial crisis was in the first place.

Yes, it's that kind of comedy, in which the joke is established immediately and the filmmakers keep telling it over and over. Sure, there are new and distinct contexts to that joke, especially as Evan Johnson's screenplay (The three directors are credited with the story) delves into some supernatural occurrences on the summit grounds and, presumably, the world beyond this insulated place. However, that doesn't mean the joke feels fresh or different each time it's told.

The whole thing begins very cheekily, with some introductory text explaining the basics of the G7 and thanking the intergovernmental organization for its participation in helping the filmmakers. The first blocks of text, describing the form and function of the annual forum as the meeting of seven liberal democracies across the world, is accurate enough. It's quickly clear the bit about the group's assistance in the making of the movie is a little jab, of course, before the metaphorical pummeling starts.

The participants at this summit, located in and around a lavish chateau in rural Germany, consist of elected leaders of Germany, France, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Japan. They're played by an international cast of actors, obviously, with the most prominent faces being Cate Blanchett as Germany's chancellor, Denis Ménochet as the President of France, and Charles Dance as the U.S. president with an out-of-place dialect.

In terms of importance, Roy Dupuis' Canadian prime minister Maxime might be the character whose actions and, more pointedly, inaction are a key focus of the filmmakers' attention, even if the other six leaders see him as well-meaning but extraneous participant—kind of as they see Canada within the forum. Maddin and the Johnsons are Canadian, in case that act of self-deprecation doesn't make it apparent.

The movie is pretty funny at the outset, as the group of leaders talk around in circles and participate in photo opportunities. One little excursion has them visiting the burial site of a bog body discovered on the vast grounds of the estate, where a little history lesson explains that such naturally mummified corpses are often those of tribal leaders who failed to their job properly. That sends a little shudder down the bodies of the seven.

Anyway, there's work to be done in putting that statement together, so the group gathers a gazebo by a lake, split in teams, and pat themselves on the back for coming up with as many non-specific but good-sounding sentiments as possible. They're so inattentive to the actual crisis at hand and what's being said that the U.S. president's dreaming ramblings are scribbled down as pearls of wisdom.

All of this is amusing, as is the way that Maxime becomes distracted by various personal issues, instead of the global calamity and a political scandal for his administration that might seem to take priority. No, he's still pining for Nikki Amuka-Bird's U.K. prime minister, with whom he had a fling during a different summit, and, later, happily welcomes advances from the German chancellor, while dreading the presence of a European Commission official, played by Alicia Vikander, with whom he also had an affair.

Stranger things start happening, though. Cellphone signals go dead. Everyone else at the chateaux seems to have disappeared (Initially, the group is more worried about no one serving them wine when it runs out). Dark, shadowy figures, whom the leaders assume to be protestors, ambush the gazebo, and after wandering the woods looking for help, they come across a brain the size of a hatchback, as Takehiro Hira's Japanese prime minister puts it. At least Rolando Ravello's Prime Minister of Italy has sliced meat to share with his colleagues.

What's going on here? Well, they're oddities, to be sure, and the filmmakers themselves shoot down any directly allegorical intentions or purpose by having the French president try and repeatedly fail to make them himself.

The joke of latter parts of Rumours, basically, is the same joke it has been from the start. None of the leaders knows or cares what's happening, except in the way it affects them, and the combination of them can only come up with more vague statements about how to think about addressing the problem. We get the joke, had gotten it immediately, and realize it gets old fast.

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