Since his out-of-nowhere debut feature Tales from the Gimli Hospital in 1988, Winnipeg-based director Guy Maddin has become synonymous with a very particular brand of cinema, a body of work so unique and axiomatic that, were his films more widely known, they would have by now settled into adjectival status, alongside Davids Lynch and Cronenberg. Maddin’s cinema draws inspiration from many quarters, but perhaps the most profound ingredient is his return to the formal language and permeable atmosphere of the silent era. Harking back to the “primitive” efforts of Méliés, Robert Wiene, Abel Gance, and Segundo de Chomón, Maddin’s cinema suggests a different historical trajectory, in which pantomime, color tinting, iris-ins and iris-outs, and an obvious, Expressionistic artifice, all won out over Griffith’s self-contained bourgeois fictions.
In recent years, Maddin has been making films with the Johnson brothers, Evan and Galen, whose complex visual manipulations have helped bring Maddin’s approach into more direct conversation with the post-Brakhage avant-garde, introducing warping effects, frame burns, and end flares, all offering an even more precise punctuation for Maddin’s singular style. The three filmmakers’ collaboration has thus far produced at least one masterwork, The Forbidden Room, a shapeshifting, labyrinthine opus that recalls the narrative conundrums of Borges.
And now, these Canadian tricksters offer us something if not completely different, certainly from the deeper recesses of the left field. For anyone coming to Rumours as an aficionado of Maddin and the Brothers Johnson, the first thing they’ll notice is how drastically little their latest work resembles their previous films. No flash frames, no irises, no early cinema pastiche. One of the early shots, introducing the chateau locale of the G7 summit, has the font and symmetry of Wes Anderson, and many of the subsequent shots, with their fogged atmosphere and gentle color palette, most closely resemble what may be the most stylistically divergent (and ambivalently received) film in Maddin’s filmography, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs. So okay, what the hell is going on here?
Rumours is the story of a particularly ill-fated meeting of the seven leaders of the industrial world, who have been charged with drafting a single collective statement about “the current crisis,” an empty political signifier that the film gradually fills to the brim. What’s at stake [SPOILER, but not if you’ve ever watched the news] is the end of the human race, and for the most part these leaders face it with the same plummy, forced optimism they’d bring to the World Bank. If politics is the art of the possible, Maddin and the Johnsons depict it as the province of the pointless, an exercise in officiousness and vainglory that at times resembles nothing so much as a summer camp for middle-aged aristocrats.
This may go some way toward explaining why Rumours’ visual approach and sound design depart from the “Maddinesque.” There’s very little overt magic (cinematic or otherwise) in this film, and that void has been filled by paranoia and repulsive glad-handing. This is both a rambling boardroom joke and the worst-ever season of MTV’s Real World: seven technocrats were lost in the woods, and you won’t believe what happened next! And unlike a lot of Maddin’s earlier work or his recent collaborations with the Johnsons, Rumours lacks overt hysteria or hit-of-nitrous immediacy. Instead, it’s a slow burn. It takes some time to see exactly where our power-suited Justice League is taking us.
As we gradually realize, the film’s stylistic austerity is in keeping with the neoliberal swing of things, the sense that democracy is a construct that can only be preserved, to an extent, by passing resolutions and applying some bastardized notion of equal protection under the law. By placing these leaders in mortal danger, we see what the political class is actually made of. Squaring off against some zombies who’ve sprung from the German property where the summit is being held — Freudian fascism’s return of the repressed — Canadian PM Maxime Laplace (Roy Dupuis) hides a baseball bat behind his back. He provides a land acknowledgment, telling the undead that he respects that they are the Indigenous keepers of the grounds they work on, before taking their heads off. In the words of the late Australian career criminal Jack Karlson, “this is democracy manifest.”
The leaders, like so many scions of the First World, are privileged babies. We discover that Laplace is still nursing wounds over an abortive fling with British PM Cardosa Dewindt (Nikki Amuka-Bird). The American president (Charles Dance), inexplicably British and actually quite reminiscent of Prince Philip, contemplates his inevitable fade into the sunset. (Autostraddle‘s Drew Burnett Gregory calls him “British accent Biden,” which is dead-on.) And rocking a vaguely Angela Merkel vibe, Cate Blanchett plays the German chancellor as flirty and a little attention-starved. French president Sylvain Broulez (the great Denis Ménochet) winds up pontificating from a wheelbarrow, for reasons best left unexplained. And in a late discovery, EU attaché Celestine Sproul (Alicia Vikander) is taking orders from a giant brain in the woods, convinced that a new political order is on the rise. (The others think she’s speaking gibberish, but in fact it’s just Swedish.)
Once you get past the initial confusion of how little Rumours looks like a “Guy Maddin film,” aside from a few digital light bleeds and a predilection for darkness, it becomes possible to see exactly what the three filmmakers are up to, and perhaps why the film has gotten a mixed reception in some quarters. It would be easy to throw a manqué dictator like Trump up on the screen to milk the predictable guffaws. (This is also true in real life, where reports from a G20 summit suggested that Boris Johnson, Justin Trudeau, and Emmanuel Macron were cracking wise about Diaper Don.) But Maddin, Johnson, and Johnson, Canadian to the bone, are more interested in taking aim at the fecklessness of liberal democracy, the administrative state, and the pious myth of good government. It’s not by chance that it’s Prime Minister Leplace who gazes straight into the abyss and welcomes the apocalypse with a well-chosen line from Neil Young. Sorry, humankind! There’ll be no more rockin’ in the free world.
DIRECTOR: Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson & Galen Johnson; CAST: Cate Blanchett, Denis Ménochet, Roy Dupuis, Alicia Vikander, Charles Dance; DISTRIBUTOR: Bleecker Street; IN THEATERS: October 18; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 43 min.
Originally published as part of NYFF 2024 — Dispatch 4.
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