Voci di potere

"Rumours" is a Guy Maddin film. So you need to know going in that it will be an absurd, surrealistic, over-the-top festival of craziness.

Maddin's first film came out in 1985. Since then, he has completed twelve feature films and dozens of shorts that are iconic among cinephiles. His work includes a short film starring Isabella Rossellini as a legless matriarch who sponsors a competition to discover which country produces the saddest music in the world. For another film, Maddin stipulated that during its theatrical release an eleven-piece orchestra, a Canadian castrato vocalist and a narrator doing voiceovers must all participate live at each screening. In a related development, the film was never offered in wide release.

In "Rumours," Maddin co-directs with long-time colleagues Evan and Galen Johnson. Evan Johnson wrote the script. The story centers on a meeting of the G7 countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan UK, US) to address an unspecified international emergency. The group soon begins to draft a position statement, in lieu of taking actual action. Even this tepid response is sabotaged by the personal agendas of the participants. The Canadian Prime Minister sleeps with the Chancellor of Germany, in part to compensate for the emotional indifference of the UK Prime Minister, a previous paramour. The French President feels the need to emote at every opportunity. The Italian President unctuously offers other G7 members a variety of sausages from the inner pockets of his coat. Eventually, these "leaders" find themselves mysteriously abandoned by the support staff. They stumble around on fog-shrouded terrain, encounter an all-seeing AI tasked with rooting out pedophiles and discover an unbodied brain the size of an SUV.

Several major actors have lent their star power to this endeavor. Of course Australian Cate Blanchett is the Chancellor of Germany. Charles Dance, a quintessential Brit (Tywin Lannister in "Game of Thrones," Lord Mountbatten in "The Crown"), portrays the US President without the inconvenience of eliminating his upper-class British accent. In a refreshing change of pace, the other G7 representatives are all veteran actors native to the countries they represent. Alicia Vikander has an incendiary cameo as an EU functionary/apocalyptic prophet whose predictions of doom are somewhat less effective because they are uttered in Swedish.

Professional critics apparently are contractually obligated to swoon because this is (kneel and genuflect here) Guy Maddin. Regular moviegoers are more likely to just pass out from boredom. While this film makes a fair point about the fecklessness of many of the leaders on the world stage, it's ultimately a one-note tune that becomes tiresome. "Rumours" elongates material would make an inspired, captivating short film. But here, it stretches its content and the moviegoers' patience past the breaking point.

I was really looking forward to watching Rumours since the premise seemed original and the trailer looked fun without giving away too much. I still enjoy zombie movies, even though there are countless examples in the genre, because with some talent and unique ideas, they can still be great.

In this film, the leaders of the seven wealthiest liberal democracies are having their annual G7 meeting in a gazebo, while something strange begins happening in the world, with zombie-like creatures appearing in the woods. The movie is a satire and heavily dialogue-driven, which I didn't mind, and the bits of humor sprinkled throughout felt like a fitting touch.

However, as the movie progresses, nothing significant really happens. The characters interact and speculate about what might be going on, but there's no real climax. It's mostly talking and walking through dark woods with little action. Occasionally, the zombies or "Bog People Dancers" as they are credited appear in the distance, but they don't pose any real threat.

I understand what the movie is trying to achieve, but it's simply not entertaining and definitely doesn't warrant a 104-minute runtime. The acting was fine, though the inconsistent accents were noticeable but not overly distracting, but still worth mentioning.

Overall, I was pretty disappointed. While there might be a small niche audience that enjoys Rumours, the majority likely won't find it engaging. [4,7/10]

Truly good satire needs a razor-sharp edge to succeed, but this latest effort from director Guy Maddin (in collaboration with filmmaking partners Evan and Galen Johnson) falls stunningly flat, resulting in a rambling, unfocused slog that somehow manages to mix messages and symbology that are simultaneously both cryptically understated and patently obvious. Set at a G7 summit in Germany, world leaders from the host country and their American, Canadian, British, French, Italian and Japanese counterparts (along with delegates from the European Union) hold their annual gathering to discuss the state of the world and pat themselves on the back for a self-congratulatory job well done (despite not possessing the requisite skills to accomplish anything meaningful or of substantive consequence other than keeping their nations' respective seats warm). They smile their hollow smiles and make empty though allegedly profound observations about a variety of subjects, all while attempting to craft one of their famous joint statements (position papers that the American president openly admits no one ever reads). In this case, the communique is meant to address some kind of undefined global crisis, but it appears to be one with apocalyptic overtones. But, in the course of their "work" - an undertaking for which they're far from qualified - they quickly find themselves in over their heads when the infrastructure around them begins to crumble, a circumstance made more ominous by the appearance of inexplicable apparitions and zombie-like bog creatures straight out of classic folklore and middle European fairy tales. One might think that this would make for an interesting premise in telling a surrealistically satirical fable about the state of contemporary world politics, but the execution here is so poorly carried off that it ends up amounting to little more than oh so much intellectual and symbolic masturbation (depicted here a little too literally and repetitive at that). To complicate matters, the narrative incorporates countless developments that go wholly unexplained, some of which presumably have to do with the symbolic emasculation of a prevailing patriarchal world in favor of an emerging female-directed paradigm, but others of which are just so enigmatically absurd that they defy description, explanation or purpose (there's more of that masturbation again, only this time reflected in the nature of the picture's screenplay elements). The overall result is a mess of a movie that, despite its gifted ensemble cast and atmospheric cinematography and production design, just doesn't work, especially since the insights it's trying to impart aren't particularly new, revelatory or funny. We're well aware of how inept many of the world's supposedly astute leaders are these days, including the fact that they're cluelessly engaged in little more than what amounts to unconscious acts of that aforementioned "self-love" (and self-aggrandizing ones at that), but do we really need a movie to remind us of that (especially one as shabbily made as this)? No thanks. If I were you, I'd duck out of this one and see what else is playing at the multiplex (or, better yet, skip it altogether).

Buñuel's movies might be lacking some zombies (at least I don't recall their presence). But IMHO they're much more to the point when it comes to avant-garde surrealism infused with political commentary. For artful, unconventional, surrealist and political satirical films, Buñuel is probably still the bench mark.

I'd strongly suggest that rather spending your time and money on the quite boring 'Rumours', you try to get your hands on VHS or Disc copy of Buñuel's first movie 'Un Chien Andalou' (The Andalusian Dog) from 1929, an unprecedented collaboration with Salvador Dalí. Or enjoy some of his classics such as 'The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie' (1972) or 'That Obscure Object of Desire' (1977).

I really didn't like this film. Fundamentally, almost nothing here worked for me. The satire can be summed up as 'politicians dumb', the photography is super weird and cheap looking, and the surrealist scenes are done without artistic reason. I have so much to say, and somehow this film has left me speechless.

Perhaps we can talk about some of the good? Cate Blanchett is okay in the lead role, but the material is so weak that it's hard to make heads or tails out of her actual performance. There are actually a couple good jokes sprinkled about its runtime. The jokes about trapping pedophiles and protestors attacking the leaders were pretty good, but only ephemeral glimmers of escape in the time warp that was this film. Perhaps another positive is that the characters in the group are all very distinctive, albeit mostly one dimensional.

On the whole, you can tell that this film is drawing from that Monty-Python-esque tradition of dry British satire, but there is so little endearing about the film. The characters are not particularly likeable, and the film makes no effort to make us want to root for the protagonists. The plot should be a straightforward zombie survival plot, but somehow we meander around with few goals or progress through the entire runtime. I'm sorry to say that the photography is awful. In day scenes, there is an ever present, odd cheesy glow. For the rest of the film, all shots are tight, despite being outdoors for virtually the whole film. It seems like just out of frame are the warehouse lights and HVAC system for the cheap and repetitive looking set. Nikki Amuka-Bird had a very poor showing in performance. Truly YouTube level acting.

Shockingly cheap film for a movie with real Hollywood actors in it.