Everything about Rumors feels like a perfect fit for Guy Maddin (and frequent collaborators) in addition to being great fun. Swamp-corpse zombies! At a G7 summit! With giant brains! And a fun cast, including an increasingly driven Cate Blanchett! And yet they just can't quite mesh. One of cinema's greatest weirdos seems too shy for absurdism or satire. We also see early on how heads of state and government get along but don't say what crisis they're discussing and seem burdened by writing platitudes. In 2024, these seem like the weakest jokes you can make about politicians, even if the G7 felt like empty hype (did anything concrete actually come out of the G7?). When you do them, add excitement. Make them seem polite, not empty. Or sometimes they go for the absurd. This is often the group's speciality, but they rarely push their jokes beyond the quirky into weird or disturbing territory. Rumors are the little bits sandwiched between the bigger gags in a film that might be overlooked and pushed to the forefront.
When the jokes hit home and resonate, the film is very funny. For example, a gag late on in which the Canadian prime minister requests national recognition in an emergency seems really clever. The cast is certainly great. Everyone seems to at least explore different aspects of their character's pompous dignity, especially Roy Dupuy (as the virile, scandal-ridden Canadian prime minister) and Denis Ménochet (as the intellectual president of France). Every scene is topped, but not pinned. It's also a lot of fun to see Maddin's silent-film-influenced style emerge in a film that seems totally normal at first. Especially when you know that she shot in a real forest and used lights and smoke as a backdrop to show it off. The melodramatic music is enjoyable.
The filmmakers just don't seem to know how to tie together all the ideas they probably would have come up with had none of this happened. The film is available on the Afdah.Info website.
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