Masturbating Zombies & Cate Blanchett Storm The G7 Summit In the Side-Splitting 'Rumours'

For most directors you probably couldn’t say that a movie about a masturbating zombie apocalypse could represent their most audience friendly film. But then Canadian iconoclast Guy Maddin clearly isn’t most directors. For forty years the world’s favorite Winnipegger (apologies to Anna Paquin) has been churning out surreal silent-film-inspired fables involving ostrich farms and Isabella Rossellini rocking glass gams full of beer—the images he’s branded into the great northern imagination have been big and strange ones.

But Rumours, wickedly hilarious Rumours, takes the cake. Like an episode of Veep sunken into a K-hole and starring his starriest cast to date—Cate Blanchett! Charles Dance! Denis Ménochet! Alicia Vikander!—this Maddin joint, chockablock with weirdness though it might be, feels aimed straight at the masses. Like a warm and fuzzy nuclear warhead.

Re-teaming with his co-directors (although co-conspirators almost seems more apt) Evan and Galen Johnson, who’ve co-conspired and directed with Maddin for the past decade, Rumours is set in the present day at the annual G7 summit, taking place this time in Germany. There the Chancellor Hilda Orlmann (Blanchett) has welcomed her six co-member world leaders to a freshly built gazebo—and I cannot emphasize how much I could listen to Cate Blanchett saying the word “gazebo” with a German accent forever—in the Black Forest, where they will churn out their latest bullshit statement on the state of the world, saying absolutely nothing in as grand a manner as they can possibly muster.

Representing the other global powerhouses we’ve got the luxuriously-locked Canadian Prime Minister slash emotional studmuffin Maxime Laplace (Roy Dupuis), the chummy French President Sylvain Broulez (Ménochet), the business-minded British Prime Minister Cardosa Dewindt (Nikki Amuka-Bird), the handy-with-meats Italian leader Antonio Lamorle (Rolando Ravello), Japan’s lightly goofy and good natured P.M. Tatsuro Iwasaki (Takehiro Hira), and the inexplicably British and thunderously old American president Edison Wolcott (Dance). Oh and there’s also the non-member hanger-on Celestine Sproul (Vikander), representing the E.U., although she takes her sweet time arriving to the summit. (But oh, what an entrance.)

After the requisite photo-op at the main mansion, the seven head down to the aforementioned gazebo in the woods for food and drink, and to split off into little writing groups to hash out their joint statement, the singular accomplishment of this pompous and circumstantial annual event. On the way down they do make one quick side-trip of note though, as Chancellor Orlmann proudly shows off the muddy hole where some “bog persons” have been freshly exhumed on the grounds.

The ancient corpses of tribe-leaders whose usefulness to their tribes came to an abrupt but ceremonious end, these figures—brown and boneless sacks of floppy person-shaped flesh, preserved there in the wet earth for centuries—seem a dark premonition of something terrible; an echo from the past suddenly sprung forebodingly onto dry land. They’re also hilariously sloppy comic props, like rubber chickens slathered in shit. The leaders all nod politely and move on.

Once the seven have been left alone to work on their statement and drink wine (so much wine), the formalities quickly dissipate, and we see them for who they really are—hormonal teenagers and gossipy blowhards; un-serious small people handed the world’s reins with very little interest in anything of substance that doesn’t get uncorked from a bottle. Their proposals are clashing jumbles of buzzwords and incoherence, all of which get tossed aside for love-triangles and sexual escapades play-acted on the forest floor.

Indeed they’re so caught up in their personal nonsense that it takes them a while to realize nobody’s filling their wine glasses anymore. (But of course that’s the thing they notice first.) Upon further inspection they discover that everyone else seems to have disappeared from the grounds, and their cell phones aren’t working. There are strange noises in the woods too, and a dark thick pea-soup mist has begun to hang over everything. It becomes a question of whether they should wait in the gazebo or venture out looking for help, for escape, but an onslaught of floppy bog people answers that question right quick. And that’s how our not-so-intrepid seven-some find themselves wandering the Black Forest through a masturbating zombie apocalypse, and oh what even bigger-brained wonders await.

Swerving between genres slalom-like, Rumours is one minute a hallucinogenic allegory, the next a gloppy goof that actively seeks to make fun of any hoity-toity reasons you might ascribe to it. The French PM, wounded and now being lugged around in a wheelbarrow, becomes convinced they’ve drifted into the land of metaphor, each of them turned avatar for their respective home countries, and great humor’s wrung from his high-strung pretensions.

Indeed the movie ultimately refuses any straightforward readings with one rug-pull after another, seeking out instead a representation of the utter nonsense of the here and now like a heat-seeking missile. This is a movie that fundamentally understands the sheer gibberish of modern living, right down to its bog-person disintegrated bones. We’re all floppy heaps of person-shaped flesh stumbling through the foggy Black Forest, half-drunk with our eyes on the Canadian Prime Minister’s ass instead of doing our jobs.

Rumours is obviously satirizing our hapless, hopeless world leaders, but it puts us all in the same boat. No coin for the ferryman, the floods are coming and we’re here jerking off over movies. Oh what a world, what a world, full of beautiful, boisterous wickedness.