What could be stranger than the hollow pomp of neoliberal politics in the face of Armageddon? While crafting this cheerfully bonkers satire, Canadian co-directors Guy Maddin and Evan and Galen Johnson became fascinated by real footage of G7 leaders coming across a puddle and awkwardly negotiating walking around it. This miniature farce didn’t exactly offer much hope for the future of humanity.
Hosted by German Chancellor Hilda Ortmann (Cate Blanchett in a coral power suit channelling Angela Merkel), world leaders representing Canada, France, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US gather for a summit on a palatial estate. They’re here for a terribly serious purpose, of course. But drafting a statement in response to an unspecified catastrophe has to wait until after the hand-shaking and toasting.
Every cast member is clearly enjoying themself, but Rumours — or perhaps ‘How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bog Bodies’ — isn’t quite as funny as it seems to think it is.
The film’s tone is knowingly odd from the off, with stilted platitudes between the politicians heightened by cranked-up saturation and intense soft focus that makes this summit look more like a lush melodrama. The American President is played by Charles Dance, inexplicably speaking in his usual English accent.
But having farted around for hours, night falls and the French President (a buffoonish and brilliant Denis Ménochet) discovers that they are under attack by a horde of masturbating reanimated bog bodies, ancient corpses preserved by mud. These bodies are thought to be leaders executed by their own people, tellingly something these politicians fear far more than the unseen global crisis. It’s the kind of surreal shtick typical of the three co-directors (or indeed Ari Aster, credited here as an executive producer).
This dim-witted troupe is forced to wander through the woods to find help, with some pointed commentary about each nation along the way, especially Canada’s inferiority complex. Every cast member is clearly enjoying themself, but Rumours — or perhaps ‘How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bog Bodies’ — isn’t quite as funny as it seems to think it is. Its lack of narrative point is, in fact, the point, but being paired with gags that raise smiles rather than laughs means it all gets a bit tiresome during its final stretch.
Still, there are some memorably daft set-pieces, like the discovery of “a brain the size of a hatchback”, Alicia Vikander babbling prophecies in Swedish and an AI system designed to detect child predators unexpectedly coming in handy. And although this film feels like a cackle in the face of humanity’s demise, there’s still an earnest frustration at its core towards our real political leaders’ march towards oblivion.