RUMOURS: 3 ½ STARS. “Unlike the politicians it depicts, it delivers on what it promises.”
SYNOPSIS: “Rumours,” a surreal new satire starring Cate Blanchett and Alicia Vikander and now playing in theatres, sees a group of clueless G7 politicians attempt to draft a provisional statement regarding a global crisis during some sort of apocalyptic event. Not even the presence of a Volkswagen-sized brain and mysterious bog people can distract from their writing their meaningless manifesto.
CAST: Cate Blanchett, Alicia Vikander, Charles Dance, Roy Dupuis, Denis Ménochet, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Rolando Ravello, Takehiro Hira, Zlatko Burić. Directed by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson.
REVIEW: Poking fun at self-serving politicians could be low hanging fruit, but “Rumours,” the new film from directors Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, doesn’t just pick the fruit, it picks it and hurls it at it subjects with great, gleeful comic force.
A surreal satire set against the backdrop of a G7 summit in Germany—starring Cate Blanchett (the German chancellor and host), Roy Dupuis (the Canadian PM), Takehiro Hira (the Prime Minister of Japan), Nikki Amuka-Bird ( the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom), Rolando Ravello as Antonio Lamorte (the Prime Minister of Italy), Charles Dance (the US president with a pronounced English accent), and Denis Ménochet (the French leader)—it’s a candy-coloured tale about calamity, lust, ineptness and self-importance.
The heightened performances are a bit of fun, given texture by a script that provides each character with enough oddball personality to match the film’s bizarre story.
The lovelorn Canadian Prime Minister, for instance, is a tortured soul who allows his crushed romantic dreams to get the best of him as events spiral. “I love strong women!” he bellows, apropos of nothing, before dashing off into the woods, as if he is ruled by passion above all else. “I love them too much!”
It’s a funny, ridiculous moment, one among many, in what is essentially a one joke movie about political ineptitude. The ineffectiveness of the politicians in almost every aspect of the action, from doing their government jobs to surviving the strange circumstances swirling around them, is wacky political satire, amplified to reveal the truth of political incompetence.
Self-important politicians have always been easy targets—Aesop wrote about political speeches that promised more than they could ever deliver and that was in late to mid-6th century BCE—but it is satisfying to poke fun at authority. Every generation demands their own stick in the side of those who walk the halls of power, so even if the themes and tropes are familiar “Rumours” is that sharpened stick. Unlike the politicians it depicts, it delivers on what it promises.
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