Cate Blanchett provided the weirdest moment at this year’s Cannes Film Festival; for Brits of a certain age, anyway. Her character reverently invokes the name of the late Roy Jenkins, Labor and former chancellor of both the exchequer and Oxford University. Blanchett plays a fictional German chancellor named Hilda Ortmann, who mentions Jenkins as the first president of the European Commission to be allowed to attend a G7 summit (which, as connoisseurs of political trivia would say, is “one for the heads’.) Maybe in her next movie Blanchett can make a big speech about Peter Shore.
Rumors is a hilariously absurd comedy co-written and directed by Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin with his longtime collaborators, brothers Evan and Galen Johnson. The title was inspired by Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 album, due to the emotional crises that allegedly accompanied its recording. The setting is a forest in the German town of Dankerode in Saxony, where a fictional G7 summit is taking place. Seven heads of government have gathered to discuss an unspecified (but apparently environmental) crisis and draft a long and fantastically useless communiqué which, as Hilda mutters to her French counterpart, President Sylvain Brulez (Denis Menochet), should be worded vaguely enough , so that they are not committed to a specific action.
American President Edison Wolcott is getting old and sleepy; he’s played by Charles Dance, confusingly in his own English voice, and there’s a joke in the script about Dance being apparently unwilling (but certainly not unable) to do an American accent. British Prime Minister Cardosa DeWind (Nicky Amuka-Bird) is stressed out because she had an affair at the last G7 summit with troubled Canadian Prime Minister and ladies’ man Maxime Laplace (Roy Dupuis), who also carries the torch of European Commission Secretary General Celestine Sproul (Alicia Vikander) and has a moment with Hilda. Rolando Ravello plays the nervous Italian Prime Minister Antonio Lamorte, and Takehiro Hira plays Tatsuro Iwesaki, the modest, shy Japanese Prime Minister.
Their G7 dinner by the lake turns into a crisis when they realize their phones are down; the castle headquarters and possibly the entire city have been abandoned and now they are completely alone – except for the 2,000 year old humans found embalmed in the Dankerode clay, who have now come to life, stumbling around the place and masturbating frantically, so the resulting tsunami of seeds it will extinguish the disastrous fires and bring forth enlightened new men.
It’s a very strange film, like a mix of George Romero with a crime-free Agatha Christie detective and maybe T’s Cocktail Party. S. Eliot. Blanchett shows that she’s actually pretty good at comedy, leading the company in some very funny set pieces. At dinner, she announces to her six guests that the theme of this year’s summit is “regret” and says they must now go around the table and say what they regret most. Tatsuro rather charmingly says that he regrets not learning to ride a horse; Sylvain begins to choke back tears as he says he regrets never really understanding his father. It’s clear that the rest of the band feels pressure to say something powerful or exciting. Next up is the Italian president, who blurts out that he regrets going to a costume party like Mussolini.
The rumors are strange and confusing, with strange forest encounters and apocalyptic episodes. There’s a really weird gag about an AI chatbot program designed to catch pedophiles. Hilda discovers the goody bags that each member of the G7 was supposed to receive, each containing a cyanide tablet – a provision now normal, she explains. Jumping story about the whining end of the world.
