Directors: Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson
On show in the US; on general release in the UK from 6 December
Leaders of the G7 nations gather on an estate outside the German village of Dankerode in Saxony-Anhalt to thrash out a joint communiqué on an unspecified (but clearly terminal) global crisis.
They used to be the G6 but then Canada joined. No one’s too sure about Canada. Its prime minister, Maxime Laplace (Roy Dupuis), keeps having to run off for a good cry. Cate Blanchett plays German chancellor Hilda Orlmann, who brings him what comfort she can. You can tell she is in love by the way she praises the line he is crafting about women and minorities.
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Back at the conference table (well, the gazebo – they ran off into the park to avoid the press), a full-on bromance is developing between the leaders of Japan (Takehiro Hira) and France (Denis Ménochet) around the entangled issues of domestic violence and supply chain management.
Nikki Amuka-Bird is Cardosa Dewindt, UK prime minister, brash, friendly and optimistic right up to the moment Maxime forgets to keep his distance (“Forget Rimini!” she implores him – the location of a brief romantic interlude. Maxime breaks a wine glass and runs off, weeping).
The leaders are invited to a photo opportunity with archaeologists excavating bog bodies in the park grounds. This causes tension, not least because the French prime minister insists on going on about his new book, all about the psychogeography of graveyards.
Soon the sun will set, the staff will vanish and the bog bodies will emerge to fecundate the earth (don’t ask). Someone called Astrid the Night Queen will stalk the land (that’s the rumour, anyway) and the European representative, Celestine Sproul (Alicia Vikander – but Europe’s a non-enumerated member, so she doesn’t count), will be found stroking a gigantic brain and whispering gibberish into “her nurturing folds”.
The world is dying and what can seven frightened 'children' do but try their best to conjure up a spell?
What makes this satire mildly amusing is the way it puts seven high-ranking politicians into an absurd situation where they end up behaving like children. What makes this a captivating, joyous and unmissable film is the way it traps them in straitjackets of diplomatic rhetoric. As they run about their patch of forest, fleeing the zombie masses, we see these innocents fall in and out of love, desert and rediscover each other, save and betray one another – and all in the emollient language of the diplomatic joint press release.
The leaders in Rumours are basically good. Sometimes they are pompous, or crack under the strain. What binds them is a desperate loneliness. The G7 meetings are about the only times they get to relax with people as unworldly as they are. Inept? Of course they are. We are all inept, if your standard of aptitude is something ridiculous like, oh, being able to save the planet.
The world is dying and what can seven frightened “children” do about that, but try their level best to conjure up a magic spell?
The directors of this unlikely sounding production are hardly household names. Their cinematic cachet, though, can be judged from the starry cast. True, Charles Dance, as the US president, does little more than nap, but he does it with great panache, and Blanchett’s comic turn as the lovelorn chancellor is easily one of the best things she has done.
Rumours is a satire about our need to communicate and the shambles we make of things when we try. It is a charming, gentle, wry, intelligent little movie. It isn’t going to make the earth tremble. But the zombies are more than capable of doing that on their own. (No, really: don’t ask.)
Simon also recommends…
Dr. Strangelove
Stanley Kubrick
A classic satire of political unworldliness that casts Peter Sellers in three roles, none of them saving the world from nuclear war.
Ratner’s Star
Don DeLillo
This madcap tale revolves around little Billy Twillig, a pubescent maths prodigy on whose word the future of the whole world hangs.
Simon Ings is a novelist and science writer. Follow him on X @simonings
