Way back during MIFF 2003 was when I first fell in love with Canadian director Guy Maddin and his eccentric, experimental films, as that year they screened “The Saddest Music in the World”; a film about a beer baroness who organises a competition between the world's nations to see just who has the saddest music in the world. The film was bat-shit crazy and unlike anything I had ever seen prior, but I remember what drew me to it was that the baroness had no legs, and thus wore glass legs that were filled with beer. To me that was just madness and genius all rolled into one, and I knew I had to see what that looked like, and it and the film did not disappoint. I also fell in love with Guy Maddin's distinctive aesthetic to his films, which look like silent films, and often employ the camera trickery that was used in that era. Since “The Saddest Music in the World” I have caught up with some of Maddin's back catalogue, and always try to see his latest, as they usually end up screening at MIFF. I do not always love every film he makes, but I rarely hate them, and I always find them at the very least visually interesting.......which brings us to Maddin's latest, “Rumours”.
The new film from Guy Maddin, along with co-directors Evan and Galen Johnson, “Rumours” is a satire about a group of world leaders at a retreat attempting to put their heads together to write a statement about a crisis-in-progress that basically tells the world not to worry, we have everything under control, without committing themselves to actually do anything about it. It is making fun of our world leaders and how they spend so much time talking about doing something, but never actually do anything. Unfortunately, I found it unfunny and the satire too obvious, but the biggest question I have about “Rumours” is how world class actors like Cate Blanchett and Alicia Vikander ended up in this drivel. That might sound like a pissy throwaway comment, but I am actually serious about the question, and curious why Blanchett in particular would sign on to something as dreadful as this. While I am sure that the answer is to work with Guy Maddin, “Rumours” is the least Maddin-like film of his entire filmography, and Blanchett is terrible in it. I have to wonder if the Johnson brothers were the key directors on the film, with Maddin just helping where he could, because with the exception of a giant brain which shows up half way through “Rumours”, I would struggle to find any of Maddin's influence on the film anywhere.
As I mentioned above, when I come to see a Guy Maddin film, I want to be wowed by his pseudo-silent film aesthetics which sadly is nowhere to be seen in “Rumours”. Instead we get a visually uninteresting and very flat looking film, with random explosions of the colour green onscreen. It is such an ugly looking film, lacking in production value and frankly production design. The images just look so bare, like no thought at all had been put into them; it was just point and shoot, we got it, lets move to the next shot. The lack of artistry on display was depressing frankly. The satire itself wasn't much better. As I said it was so obvious, which made it all so unfunny. Yes, politicians do nothing, yes they use big intellectual words to convince us of the opposite, look at the French diplomat needing help from the other nations, etc etc. It was all just low-hanging-fruit. Oh, let's not forget the masturbating bog creatures demonstrating what the statement they are writing for the world really means! That's edgy isn't it? Ho-Hum.
As you can probably tell, I did not have a good time with “Rumours”, but was there anything that I did enjoy about it? Actually there was. I thought both Charles Dance and Rolando Ravello were very good in their roles, playing the US president and Italian prime minister respectively. Dance is amusing as a president who has a bad habit of nodding off, but it was Ravello who particularly made me laugh portraying has character as a nice dimwit, with him forgetting his phone and sharing the meat he stole from the dinner table being the only real laughs I had during the whole film. Hang on, I also chuckled when the world leaders questioned how in the world Canada became part of the G7.
Because I disliked the film so much, I do not have a lot to say about “Rumours” but the last thing I will mention is when the statement was finally “written”, filled with all the latest buzz words and posturing that you would expect in a statement like this, it was scary how close it sounded to some of the real statements we hear when politicians try to appease the public. It is a whole lot of words saying nothing, which makes the metaphor of the bog monsters masturbating like crazy while the Canadian prime minister reads it aloud pretty obvious; the whole thing is a wank!
Overall, I thought “Rumours” was a juvenile experience and a total disappointment from the usually interesting Guy Maddin. Here, with his co-director Johnson siblings, they have created an unfunny and obvious satire on world leaders, who are big on talk but small on any real action. The film contains one of Cate Blanchett's worst performances yet, a strangely cast Alicia Vikander who speaks only in Swedish, a pointless giant brain and the blandest visual display ever seen in a Guy Maddin film. Sadly I thought “Rumours” was terrible (but if it means anything, apparently I am in the minority here).
2 Stars.
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