Lost in the woods and fog, the global leaders are confronted by 2,000-year-old zombie-like bog people, symbolizing the Indigenous ancestors.
Cate Blanchett stars in Rumours, a surreal satire that has a Buñuelian vibe. Rumours is set in Germany amidst an unspecified global crisis that has triggered a summit of the Group of Seven. Spewing statesmanlike gobbledygook, the leaders of this intergovernmental forum of developed “democracies” meet to put out the fire du jour that’s threatening the international order in this 103-minute black comedy co-directed by Guy Maddin, Galen Johnson and Evan Johnson, who also wrote this film farce.
The G7 bigwigs include: Blanchett as Hilda Orlmann, a Merkel-looking German Chancellor; Charles Dance (Game of Thrones) as Edison Wolcott, an over the hill Biden-like US President (despite his inexplicable veddy British accent); Takehiro Hira (Shogun) is Japan’s Prime Minister Tatsuro Iwasaki; Denis Ménochet plays French president Sylvain Broulez as a bookish boor; while Rolando Ravello portrays the Mussolini-admiring Italian leader, Antonio Lamorle. Swedish actress Alicia Vikander plays an EU or EC high ranking apparatchik.
Denis Ménochet, Rolando Ravello, Takehiro Hira, Charles Dance, Cate Blanchett, Roy Dupuis, and Nikki Amuka-Bird in Bleecker Street's RUMOURS Credit: Bleecker StreetNikki Amuka-Bird portrays Cardosa Dewindt, the UK PM who has a Condoleezza Rice stick-in-the-mud vibe and spurns the advances of her Canadian counterpart, Maxime Laplace (Roy Dupuis), who like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, is quite a handsome fellow. Canadians may be stereotyped as overly polite, but the scandal-plagued, married Maxime is temperamental and distraught that Cardosa doesn’t want to pick up where they left off, following a one-night stand at a previous high-level powwow of the muckety-mucks. With his manbun, the high-strung, addled Dupuis, whose amorous attentions turn to Blanchett’s chancellor, steals the show. (Interestingly, the self-deprecating co-directors are Canadians.)
After palavering in a chateau and a photo op the elite septet repair to a gazebo for a working dinner where they intend to flesh out a communique about the predicament that has befallen the world and brought them together. However, at the gazebo a quandary entangles the head honchos, who mysteriously become stranded from the rest of the world and are inexplicably abandoned at the pavilion. Their servants vanished, the grand poohbahs must fend for themselves. The top bananas proceed to try to pursue writing their statement for the world’s press, experience sexual peccadilloes, and so on.
Lost in the woods and fog, the global leaders are confronted by 2,000-year-old zombie-like bog people, symbolizing the Indigenous ancestors, the people of the past, who are not very pleased with the way things have turned out in 2024. Ralph Berkin has a cameo as an anthropologist explaining the significance of these undead creatures from the Iron Age, who inject a tone of terror and horror into the movie. A giant brain appears foretelling a New World Order. And there are repeat references to the 1992 Treaty of Maastricht, which established the European Union.
As the G7 heads of state try to find their way back to the chateau, stumbling through the forest in the dark, they reminded me of the posh diners in Luis Buñuel 1972’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, whose attempts to eat are repeatedly thwarted. The G7 leaders may be heads of state, but they are certainly not above having very human foibles and follies. Rumours is a sophisticated political satire with surrealistic panache, for moviegoers who dig that kind of thing, and is likely to leave viewers pondering: “Gee, Seven”?
Rumours theatrically opened October 18.
