by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $12.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Charles Dance, Cate Blanchett, Denis Menochet, Roy Dupuis, Takehiro Hira, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Alicia Vikander, Zlatko Buric
Intro:
… an interesting attempt to take Guy Maddin’s idiosyncratic style and make it more palatable for the mainstream …
Guy Maddin doesn’t make ‘normal films’ as a rule. When commissioned to make a cinematic tribute to San Francisco for the 60th San Francisco International Film Festival in 2017, he turned in The Green Fog, a loose remake of Hitchcock’s Vertigo made from samples of other films, TV shows, and an N*SYNC music video. He is less filmmaker and more necromancer, staying in perpetual contact with the spirits of dead films to create singularly bizarre works of film art.
While there are flashes of his usual silent-era retroisms with its striking staging and discombobulated relationship with the spoken word, the premise of Rumours, and even its later absurdist trappings are closer to Iannucci than Murnau. Same goes for its relatively high-profile cast, with Cate Blanchett and Charles Dance (among others) as the world leaders that make up G7 trying to collaborate on a statement concerning some kind of global crisis. The specifics aren’t all that important, as the prevailing atmosphere of apocalyptic folk horror fills in the gaps.
As the leaders engage in jargonese, fixating on talk rather than engaging in action, their respective archetypal characterisations and genre circumstances of being lost in the middle of the woods and beset by monstrous horrors give it the vibe of an ‘80s creature feature, with the leaders of the free world standing in for the usual cannon-fodder teenagers.
As political satire, that’s the main button that keeps being pushed, about the inability for substantial and required change when handled by the emotionally inert. However, it doesn’t wring as much out of that idea as it could’ve, or even should’ve. It may share hallmarks with Iannucci, but it lacks his cutting wit or lack of apprehension about taking on the major players. Hell, in terms of poking at the absurdity of this as the reality of government, it pales against Dr. Strangelove.
It may lack bite, but it still contains Maddin’s characteristically Canadian sense of humour. The mannerisms that resulted in the impotent yelping for tree spirits in Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, and multiple lobotomies to cure an ass fetish in The Forbidden Room are not so easily stifled. Here, that manifests with the aforementioned bog bodies (meeting the figurative circle-jerk of political discourse with the literal kind), a car-sized brain, and an ending that is as perfectly-pitched in its pomposity as it is frustrating. The bonkers energy of Maddin and his regular collaborators the Johnson brothers is still here, but it struggles to shine through all the placid roundabout conversating.
It doesn’t help that the overall mood of the film smacks of the ineffective doomer nightmare aesthetic found in Ari Aster work. Pointing out how fucked we are, while just submitting to that as inevitability, is really starting to wear thin.
Rumours is an interesting attempt to take Guy Maddin’s idiosyncratic style and make it more palatable for the mainstream, and it could serve as a potential introduction for a deep dive into his larger catalogue (which is highly recommended). But this would-be comedy of manners is a little too well-mannered to be as biting as it wishes to be, with frustration gradually mounting as the gap keeps expanding between its genuinely funny aspects (the layers of surreality blanketing Charles Dance as the U.S. President is its own kind of genius) and the weak will behind what it actually has to say about the nature of political power. Guy Maddin doesn’t make normal films as a rule, and going by this, he shouldn’t try to.
