Text that opens Rumours explains what the G7 is, and then improbably thanks all the current G7 leaders for providing consultation and help on the film. It is a reminder that this latest from co-directors Evan Johnson (who also wrote it), Galen Johnson and Guy Maddin is all at once grounded in reality while embracing absurdity.
It is a moment of crisis. Global crisis. Its precise nature remains foggy, and is never explained, but that barely matters, as there is always a crisis, and addressing a crisis with a united front is what the G7, now assembled for a summit, is always doing. After several photo opportunities for the press in the wooded gardens of a remote chateau in Dankerode, the seven – German Chancellor Hilda Ortmann (Cate Blanchett), US President Edison Wolcott (Charles Dance), Canadian Prime Minister Maxime Laplace (Roy Dupuis), French President Sylvain Broulet (Denis Ménouchet), UK Prime Minster Cardosa Dewindt (Nikki Amuka-Bird), Italian Prime Minister Antonio Lamorte (Rolando Ravello) and Japanese Prime Minister Tatsuro Iwasaki (Takehiro Hira) – settle down for a private dinner under a lakeside pagoda, where they are to thrash out together “a draft of a provisional statement regarding the present crisis.” Here, the actual taking of meaningful action is always deferred.
In a sense, Rumours tracks the way these seven rulers merge their individual interests, passions and foibles into a single speech designed to offer bland reassurance while conceding little and concealing detail – much as later Maxime will need to draft text messages that somehow are flirtatious enough to raise alarms with a paedophile-detecting chatbot, without going quite far enough to cause potentially lasting trauma to a real little girl. For the audience of these seven is the whole world in all its conflicting, contradictory variety, and the formulae on which they settle must be as non-committal as possible in order to please – or at least not offend – anyone who listens. Their job is to bury uncomfortable, frightening realities – of revolutionary change and inevitable death – in a shroud of emptily seductive words.
Even as they drink, dine and work, new crises will emerge from their Buñuelian banquet. All the staff vanish, Iron Age bog people emerge from their resting places beneath the ground, a car-sized human brain materialises in the woods, the confused Secretary-General of the European Commission Celestine Sproul (Alicia Vikander) appears raving in her ‘new language’ about the advent of Queen Astrid to overturn the current order and usher in the next era, while Jonas Glob (Zlatko Buric), alone in the chateau, will suggest that malfunctioning AI is taking over the world. Surely all that is required from this bumbling septet to hold off the surreal chaos closing in is the right combination of soothing words.
At one point the French President will ask, with near redundant obviousness, if all these events might be read “allegorically”. For Rumours depicts an exaggerated and vaguely defined but still all too recognisable world under constant threat from both its renascent past and its technological future, with only corrupt, effete, appetitive, petty ineffective leaders to protect or at best comfort us from the encroachment of a mortality that can never truly be kept at bay. It is also, for all these weighty themes, deliriously funny, making great play of national stereotypes, political posturing and the pathetically schlubby humanity of those in power. In many ways, it is a one-joke film, but that joke is told so well, and with so many unexpected deviations, that it never grows tiresome.
Meanwhile, where Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie à Deux (2024) likened its own viewers to uncomprehending fanboys in clownface, Rumours goes one further, positioning the speech’s ultimate audience – and by implication, global viewers too – as grunting, masturbating primitives. Here, we are very much being put in our place, and reminded that, beneath all the trappings of civilisation, the same essentially antediluvian nature, instinct and doom remain. This is such a savage satire of collective human endeavour in all its circular futility, with the viewer in its sights as much as the characters, that if you do not laugh with it, you might just end up howling and weeping into the apocalypse that is coming for us all.
strap: Buñuelian banquet: Evan and Galen Johnson and Guy Maddin’s surrealist summit has G7 leaders facing an absurdist apocalypse with only bland, empty words
© Anton Bitel
