Rumours is the latest collaboration between by Canadian filmmaking icon Guy Maddin and siblings Evan and Galen Johnson.Elevation Pictures
- Rumours
- Directed by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson
- Starring Cate Blanchett, Roy Dupuis and Alicia Vikander
- Classification N/A; 103 minutes
- Opens in select theatres Oct. 18
Critic’s Pick
There are several wonderful gifts proffered in the new Canadian comedy Rumours that moviegoers never could have possibly anticipated desiring, yet should hold close all the same.
Who knew, for instance, that cinema was desperate for Quebecois star Roy Dupuis (The Rocket) to play a swaggering-dolt facsimile of Justin Trudeau, complete with man-bun? Or that audiences would be richer to watch Cate Blanchett, in full Angela Merkel mode as the laser-focused chancellor of Germany, save the world from an artificial intelligence bot intent on entrapping child predators? And then there are the undead bog people, who surface midway through the film with a feverish desire to masturbate.
I realize that none of the above makes much sense in isolation. And they don’t form any kind of cohesive reality, either, once pieced together by Canadian filmmaking icon Guy Maddin, working with long-time collaborators and siblings Evan and Galen Johnson (The Forbidden Room, Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton). But that is exactly the point of Rumours, a wonderfully surreal farce that also might be, bizarrely enough, the trio of filmmakers’ most accessible work ever.
Set in the midst of a G7 summit held in the German village of Dankerode, the film charts how quickly carefully choreographed political theatre can disintegrate into every-man/nation-for-himself survivalism with outré comic flair. At the beginning of the meeting, all seems warm and fuzzy between the leaders of Germany (Blanchett), Canada (Dupuis), the United States (Charles Dance), France (Denis Ménochet), the U.K. (Nikki Amuka-Bird), Italy (Rolando Ravello) and Japan (Takehiro Hira). But quite suddenly, everyone’s various aides disappear, the electricity at the host estate is cut, cellphone service collapses and a thick fog (both of the literal and one-of-confusion variety) blankets the land.
An experiment in prestige quirk, Maddin and the Johnsons’s film isn’t as interested in satirizing the complex and frustrating nature of geopolitics as they are in using the material to unload a heaping load of gags ranging from the scatological to the philosophical. Which might be a frustrating exercise if the directors didn’t hit their mark more often than not. From the appearance of a giant, pulsating brain to the nearly unremarked-upon fact that the U.S. President has a British accent to the resurrection of the aforementioned bog people, what could have been a grab bag collection of jokes coalesces into something poetically absurd.
Crucially, the filmmakers manage to give all seven of their leaders – along with a quick but memorably loopy appearance from Alicia Vikander as the Secretary-General of the European Commission – enough space to get in on the fun. Blanchett is the biggest name in the cast by far – not to mention the highest-wattage performer that Maddin and the Johnsons, or anyone to ever come out of Winnipeg, have ever come close to standing near – but she is also a gracious member of the international ensemble, eager to cede punchlines to Ménochet (whose character dreams of building Western Europe’s largest sun dial) or Ravello (who seems to be going for a mix of Mussolini and Berlusconi).
The true standout performer, though, has to be Dupuis – perhaps not a total surprise given the heritage of Rumours’ filmmakers. As the smouldering, smooth-talking, impossibly courageous Canadian Prime Minister Maxime Laplace, Dupuis delivers both a libidinous fantasy and deranged send-up of what our country’s collective consciousness imagines our image on the world stage to be. If the Liberals want to beat Pierre Poilievre, there’s still time to recruit Dupuis.