Rumours
Rumours is a political satire that loses steam in the middle, and ends up taking far too long to get to the point. Rather than a fun, absurdist ride, it drags along with far too much melancholy.
Full Disclosure: I first saw a trailer for Rumours before a screening of Woman of the Hour. I’d never heard of the film before, but it looked like a crazy and fun political satire, and billing itself as “Night of the Living Dead meets Dr. Strangelove” is certainly an intriguing premise.
Review
Absurdist political satire is tricky to get right. You need to know what your message is, invent a crazy set of circumstances to in which to put your characters to demonstrate that message, and then have a lot of fun along the way. Sometimes films of this type can end up being too ponderous and heavy-handed, other times they can get so caught up in the absurdity that they lose track of their message. Rumours, a new Canadian-German production, somehow manages to make both of those mistakes.
The film starts with a very basic premise: a bunch of world leaders come together for a G7 summit in a remote location, eager to produce a statement on some undefined current crisis in the world. Their host for the summit, the German Chancellor Hilda Orlmann (played by Cate Blanchett) shows them an archeological dig site, before they settle down for discussions, where ancient bodies have been perfectly preserved in a bog. Their early efforts to draft a joint statement on the crisis get off to a rocky start as each leader is distracted by personal problems and romantic tensions between them. Things really take a turn for the worst when they discover that all of their aides have disappeared, and that the “bog people” seem to have risen and (maybe?) attacked Sylvain, the French President.
Most of the setup is complete nonsense, of course. Real life spoiler alert, but presidents and prime ministers at a summit don’t actually huddle around a laptop writing joint statements themselves. Usually these things are negotiated in advance and refined at the event by numerous diplomats and other underlings, and the leaders often have little idea about what went into creating whatever document they end up signing. But this is all fine, and a perfectly reasonable suspension of disbelief to support the main themes of the movie about the ineffectiveness of political leaders to deal with problems.
The G7 leaders posing in front of one of the bog people, before they come back to life, and then do little throughout the movie except masturbate.
At this point the movie still holds some promise. How are they going to work together to solve their current predicament, and will it go any better than their efforts to solve the world’s larger problems? Unfortunately, it’s here that the film really begins to fall flat. Going in, I was hoping that Rumours might be a quirky, clever political film in the manner of something like The Death of Stalin. It wasn’t that at all. It was much more maudlin than fun. Much of the film consists of the characters, particularly Maxime, the Canadian Prime Minister, moaning about their personal issues or feeling depressed about the future. For a film with such a wild and bizarre premise [G7 summit gets attacked by zombie-like bog people] this whole movie was surprisingly dull.
The overall impression is that this is meant to be a send-up of the absurdity and fecklessness of international summits (and really, political leaders in general), and their inability to actually confront existing world problems and develop meaningful solutions. And there were some genuinely funny lines and moments in the film. The problem is that it frequently seemed to lose track of what exactly it was meant to be satirizing, as we focussed on the bizarre behaviour of the main characters.
It often felt a bit like an undercooked student film, only with a bigger budget and well-known actors. The middle part of the movie drags, as though the filmmakers didn’t quite know what to do with their premise. One issue is that the bog people were incredibly underused. The only “attack” by them takes place off screen and we’re only told about it by one of the characters. This movie definitely doesn’t care about the old maxim “show, don’t tell”. The bog people, when they’re seen at all, and not forgotten about from scene to scene, don’t really do anything except stand around, and occasionally masturbate (yes, that happens). In many ways, this might all have worked better as a short film because it just seems like there wasn’t enough beyond the initial premise to sustain a full feature.
Spoilers Ahead
The German Chancellor and Canadian and UK Prime Ministers. Three members of a bizarre love triangle of sorts that plays out over the course of the summit.
I wish there was more to say here except there isn’t really much in the way of spoilers that can be said because very little actually happens. The world leaders spend most of the film crashing around in the woods, and in the end come to the realization that no one is actually coming to help. The metaphor here seems clear, that world leaders are always looking to others to solve problems that they should be addressing themselves.
They do find a couple of other survivors, one being the head of the European Council, Celestine Sproul, played by Alicia Vikander, who speaks only in Swedish, and is obsessed by a gigantic car-sized brain that they come across in the middle of the woods. Like much of the rest of the movie, the purpose behind the giant brain, or what it’s meant to satirize, if anything, is far too opaque, and so any meaning remains elusive. Celestine is a former flame of Maxime, who he has been pining for forever, despite also having affairs with Hilda and the British PM Cardosa Dewindt (played by Nikki Amuka-Bird).
In the end, they all make it back to the main building where Maxime is finally struck with inspiration and cobbles together all of the random and disparate notes that the leaders have written down over the course of the film in an effort to create their final statement, which he then reads out dramatically from a balcony to a few of the bog people in the foggy field below.
The “provisional statement” is a meaningless jumble of platitudes and self-interested obsessions, read out with such self-importance that it appears to have the weight of import behind it, while really being nonsensical gibberish. This is reminiscent of many negotiated statements that derive from international summits and forums, but exaggerated to an absurd degree. This was the best part of the movie, and the moment when the satire seemed to bite hardest. Unfortunately, it was a long walk to get there, and not really worth the journey.
A giant brain that they come across in the woods. That’s about all the explanation the movie gives.
5 Quick Hits
It’s really unclear why Charles Dance, as the American president, speaks with the actor’s normal British accent. At one point another character starts to ask him about it only for them to be interrupted. What we’re left with is the impression that this is just weird for the sake of being weird, or it was just pure laziness on the part of Dance or those in charge of casting.
The music by Kristian Eidnes Andersen (who has previously composed music for films by Lars Von Trier among others) was deliberately overly-dramatic and intrusive. And while sometimes that might be annoying in another kind of film, in this case it really helped drag the action from one scene to the next.
In an ensemble cast of 7 often someone’s character is going to be given short shrift. Unfortunately in this case it was Takehiro Hira’s Japanese Prime Minister. Hira, most recently seen playing an excellent and important character in the series Shogun, was criminally underused in this film.
The movie has three credited directors (Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson, and Guy Maddin). Not sure I’ve seen this before, certainly not for a non-animated film, and one which is so relatively straight forward. I really wonder how this all went down on set.
1. Most of the film was shot with a very soft lens, and most scenes involved the use of mist and like fog machines. I guess that was meant to highlight the dreamlike nature of what was happening. That’s fine, I suppose, but it seemed a little overused.
