NYFF '24: "Rumours" serves political satire à la Maddin

by Cláudio Alves

Rumours is probably Guy Maddin's most accessible film, flirting with the mainstream in ways most of his work never did. That's relative, however, and one shouldn't presume the Winnipeg-based auteur has defanged himself in some desperate attempt to score the public's approval. This G7 pitch-black comedy is still weirder than your favorite Hollywood directors' wildest swing, keeping true to Maddin's cinema of transgression. It involves, among other things, bog body zombies that jack off until they explode, a giant brain with a horny aura, the pedophile-tracker-like ChatGPT taking over the world, and Cate Blanchett playing the Hetalia version of Germany by way of a SNL Angela Merkel…

Humor is subjective, so take this with a mountain-sized grain of salt, but Rumours is one of the year's funniest movies. It knows just how much it should take itself seriously – which isn't a lot – and when to prod hot-button political topics to spike its satire a bit. Silly to a shamelessly high degree, this Maddin (and Evan and Galen Johnson) project lobs a joke at the audience before its action even starts, presenting a title card declaring: "Producers would like to thank the G7 leaders for their support and consultation during the making of this film." You have to love the cheekiness. If you don't, this may not be the picture for you.

Introductions aside, Rumours' story properly starts as the G7 leaders assemble somewhere in the German countryside. Cate Blanchett is Germany, as previously mentioned, while Charles Dance plays an inexplicably British United States of America, complete with star-spangled-banner napkins to keep an ill-fitting suit unsoiled. Roy Dupris is a romantically forlorn Canada who seems to share an erotic history with a couple of his colleagues, including Nikki Amuka-Bird's United Kingdom. Rolando Ravello's Italy is eager to acquiesce to higher powers, and Takehiro Hira's Japan always feels a tad passive, mayhap out of place.

Truth be told, all these politician characters have people names, but their representative role overrides whatever personality they might possess. In one of his more enlightened tirades, Denis Ménochet's France even comments on this, leading everybody down a path of paranoia as they try to decipher the macro meanings of their own behavior. It's as if the movie has suddenly become self-aware, meta-cinematic and almost meta-literary. But it takes a long while until Rumours reaches that point. On the way there, we have much to unravel and a lot of pomp and circumstance to tolerate. Or, in Maddin's case, subvert.

The ceremonial formalities are evident, shot with glowing cinematography and presentational compositions. But, rather than realpolitik or some theater of democracy, these moments feel like the opening salvo of a black mass. It's not just the dialogue pointing toward a vision of world leaders as demons in the deepest circles of hell. The score is doing a lot of the heavy lifting, with composer Kristian Eidnes Andersen having the time of his life in this Jerry Goldsmith pastiche. And that's just one of the many flavors in the Rumours symphonic feast. Not long after, you'll find Andersen indulging in the sleazy sax and suave piano of some sexy mid-90s TV movie of the week. 

Later, the score will go romantic, then melodramatic, experimental, roaring, even apocalyptic. It's a shapeshifting thing, insincerity made music, always keen on insinuating new meaning into the images or underline their evident moods until they can't help but feel absurd. Visually, Maddin and DP Stefan Ciupek are also up to some neat tricks. They often manage to take the commonplace and turn it off-kilter, like the many photo-ops, those showcases of modern politics as a celebrity circus ran rampant. At times, after the picture's been taken, the camera will go low and regard the characters from a POV that seems more aligned to the bog body they pose with than the living clowns they really are.

Other instances find dialogues shot between mediums staring almost directly into the actor's eyes. It's as if Maddin took Ozu's conversational techniques and dipped them in vinegar with a dash of bile. The framing does odd things to the players' delivery, already stilted in that way a Shakespearean Company might be if asked to act out College Humor skits. Creaky and beyond reason, their work might evade conventional notions of what good acting constitutes, but it's all the better for it. And isn't it delightful to see the likes of Blanchett and Dance stretch themselves past the point of common sense and good taste? 

Moreover, what other actorly register could apply here? As the G7 goes to feast in a gazebo by the lake, they find themselves talking in circles of nonsense. They speak, speak and speak some more and say naught of value. Rumours is a movie about the pervasive poison of making a lot of noise while doing very little, loud inaction vivisected and exposed for the stupid spectacle it is. Of course, it's also the harbinger of doom and the end of all things. As day turns to night, the politicians find that everyone else seems to have disappeared. Also, there are zombies afoot. And like a bunch of ostriches in business wear, these idiots are always ready to bury their heads in the sand.

Well, America is more like a narcoleptic warmongering possum, napping on the side. In that regard, he may be in tune with the picture's descent into the oneiric. Because, at this point, instead of decades-old prestige TV and toothless multiplex cinema, Maddin begins exploring a more cancerous permutation of the Rumours aesthetic. The night is blue and purple, making folks' skin flare Lisa Frank pink, while the diffuse light starts to seem more irradiated than fairytale-like. It's too inelegant to be beautiful, going for the gaudy grotesque as its stylistic principle and tone. Who said the world's end has to be a tragedy? Maddin sees it as a farce, and he may be the most lucid of us all.

He is also full of contempt for his characters and what they represent, injecting an industrial dose of nastiness into the cinematic organism. That even translates to the camera's behavior toward what it's depicting. Think back to the director's past work and you'll find that Maddin's films often have a reverential attitude toward the languages they ape and homage, sometimes tear down and bring back from the dead. In Rumours, he seems eager to take the piss off his chosen form and confront the Hollywood models like a bull in a China shop. Well, if that proverbial beast were high on absinthe and a hefty dose of some fantastical psychotropic.

Metaphors caught in a Guy Maddin allegory, the elected clowns despair their way across a picture whose rhythms go lethargic as its madness grows. Regardless, Rumours builds up to a joke so lunatic you must admire the chutzpah sustaining it. When red light crosses the horizon – either dawn or a nuclear inferno - Canada will try to save the day through a land acknowledgment and a word salad that's all sound and fury signifying nothing. But, in Western political fashion, a speech that says nothing is enough to summon the horns of heaven, announcing that Valhalla is upon us and victory is here. And like everything else in a movie that gags at the thought of self-seriousness, victory is nothing. So nothingness wins - hooray!? Put that nihilism in your pipe and smoke it.

Rumours is playing in the Spotlight section of the 62nd NYFF. Bleecker Street will give it a limited theatrical release starting next week.

Comments

[thevoid99]

I want to see this. I've seen a few films of Guy Maddin as he's always got something weird yet fascinating in whatever he does.

[Cláudio Alves]

He's certainly one of our most unique auteurs. I need to watch more of his stuff, though, especially the early pre-00s work.