There’s a wry joke lurking in the title of this eccentric political satire from directors Guy Maddin and Evan and Galen Johnson: Named after the seminal Fleetwood Mac album, Rumours invokes the behind-the-scenes legend of that work to suggest that it, too, chronicles the making of a masterpiece miraculously hewn out of intense emotional turmoil. The gag is that, though the movie charts the attempts of another group of people to overcome personal dramas of their own and write something meaningful (in this case, a political statement meant to unify and even save the world), the results decidedly do not approach the heights of Fleetwood Mac’s magnum opus.
Instead, the leaders of the G7 countries—Germany, France, Italy, Japan, the U.K., the U.S. and Canada—craft a statement of so many words and such little meaning that it’s almost impressive. Convening at a Saxony castle to brainstorm a response to a global crisis that Rumours deliberately leaves vague, the politicians produce a whopping nothingburger of a declaration, full of superficial phrases that make your eyes glaze over, like “bilateral management,” “global jurisdiction” and “domestic opposition.”
“Go Your Own Way” this is not, but the vacuity is the point, and the movie’s ensemble admirably go all-in on their characters’ profound ineffectualness. There’s Cate Blanchett as the German Chancellor, Denis Ménochet as the sensitive mansplainer of a French President and Charles Dance doing zero accent work as a posh old boy who has somehow been elected U.S. President. Less prominent in Rumours‘ narrative are Rolando Ravello as the endearingly stupid Italian Prime Minister, Nikki Amuka-Bird as his U.K. counterpart and Takehiro Hira as the unassuming Japanese leader (with the latter two actors particularly underused).
Though Roy Dupuis may be the least starry of the bunch—viewers might recognize him from the ’90s television adaptation of La Femme Nikita or Maddin and Evan Johnson’s The Forbidden Room—he just edges the others out of center-stage as the Canadian premier. It’s an ironic inversion of a joke the film makes often (about Canada being a mostly forgettable player in global politics), but Dupuis is a stand-out in his own right. Sporting a sleek man-bun, he has all the dashing looks of a Bold and the Beautiful regular, a characteristic he taps into for his ironically soap opera-esque performance as Canada’s brooding womanizer of a leader, who has “international relations” with two of his colleagues.
Though Rumours makes sporadic gestures at the other side of the screen via this invocation of Justin Trudeau and Blanchett’s Hilda Ortmann (an Angela Merkel type with a sweeping Ursula von der Leyen-style bouffant), the film is mostly a soupy satire of an entire generation of politicians, rather than a sharp commentary on any real people. It digs its heels in on this oblique approach in its second act, which sees the politicians forced to contend firsthand with a hallucinatory second global crisis. After toiling away at their statement for hours, the G7 call for more wine, but are alarmed when no one comes running to the sound of their service bell. With their phones no longer working, they’re forced to venture out into the woods to seek help. It’s in the deep purple (sometimes green) mist enveloping the forest that the leaders encounter “dark, shadowy figures” whom they naturally assume are “protestors” (Blanchett comically delivering the word as if referencing the bogeyman himself).
Before this point, Rumours has felt less like a Maddin-Johnsons movie than an Armando Iannucci satire, albeit less pointed. There are some absurdist notes characteristic of the trio’s work in the initial brainstorming scenes—there’s talk of building Europe’s largest sundial in response to the original crisis, and someone makes the groundbreaking proposal of holding the Olympics every three years, not four—but it’s once we’re in the woods that we’re really made to remember whose movie it is we’re watching. It turns out those ominous forest figures are actually Iron Age “bog bodies,” slimy corpses half-preserved by the swamp whom archaeologists have recently unearthed on the castle grounds. Though the movie does away with the Frankensteined silent film aesthetic that has characterized the directors’ previous work, bizarro touches like these prehistoric zombies and their literal circlejerks—plus a giant disembodied brain—imbue Rumours with that familiar Maddin-esque fever-dream quality.
Things only get freakier from here, but Rumours retains its arms-length approach to critiquing impotent political orders. Opening on a jokey title card thanking the G7 leaders for their support, the film suggests they’re in for a scathing takedown, but Rumours never really offers more in this regard than its initial premise: How much of a farce it is that these people lead anything at all? While that gentle ribbing serves well enough to begin with, when the film shifts gear into balls-to-the-wall weirdness, the gulf between its two modes widens, and the satire starts to look a little toothless in light of just how far the filmmakers prove themselves willing to go on the other side.
Admirably high-concept, endearingly silly, but also not quite ambidextrous enough, Rumours marks a wobbly transition from the avant-garde to the mainstream for its directors, who’ve never made a work this “accessible” before. While it is a thrill to see them throw something so gleefully bonkers at a cast of this combined star power, the movie’s marriage of sensibilities doesn’t always come together well enough to cement the jump as a total success. Still, there’s a healthy enough fever-dream streak here not to write off the directors’ shift into higher gear as a misstep. After all, who else but these weirdos could give us German Chancellor Cate Blanchett trying to convince a honey-trapping AI chatbot that she’s a pedophile?
Director: Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson
Writer: Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson
Starring: Cate Blanchett, Alicia Vikander, Charles Dance, Denis Ménochet, Roy Dupuis
Release Date: May 18, 2024 (Cannes)
Farah Cheded is a British-Algerian critic and Columbo enthusiast. Her work can be found at outlets including Film School Rejects, Paste Magazine, and The Playlist.