Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson and Guy Maddin's political satire pits world leaders against an unlikely climate event.
As the world burns, you’d be daft not to be disillusioned with political leaders who often pay mere lip service to solving the issues plaguing society. This is especially true for the ones who make up the G7: an annual political and economic forum of the world’s wealthiest liberal democracies (plus representatives from the European Union), where they discuss matters such as international security and climate change.
For a certain generation, it can seem like the G7’s only discernible impact was inspiring Bob Geldof to redo Live Aid again in 2005 with Live 8 (back when Russia was still in the G8), a series of benefit concerts in support of pressuring the G8 to increase aid to eliminate poverty. While a pledge was made to up financial aid, the disparity between the rhetoric and the demonstrable efforts to reduce global poverty afterwards made it seem a public relations stunt at best. The G8’s words had less lingering impact than haunting memories of Pete Doherty and Elton John butchering T.Rex’s “Children of the Revolution”.
All that brings us to the absurdist comedy-horror Rumours, ostensibly the most mainstream film that Canadian experimentalist Guy Maddin (My Winnipeg) has ever made, here co-directing with Evan and Galen Johnson. Their film presents a delicious premise for anyone rightly dissatisfied with the world’s most ‘powerful’ political figures: what if all the ineffectual members of the G7 got lost in the woods and had an awful time? And that’s before they come into contact with zombie-like creatures that violently masturbate.
We have the president of the United States (Charles Dance). We have the chancellor of Germany (Cate Blanchett). We have the British prime minister, brilliantly played by Nikki Amuka-Bird. We have the president of France (Denis Ménochet). We have the Canadian (Roy Dupuis), Italian (Rolando Ravello) and Japanese prime ministers (Takehiro Hira). We have all these characters. And partway through, they stumble upon Alicia Vikander as the secretary-general of the European Commission, who rambles prophecies in Swedish beside a giant brain right out of Futurama.
Before encountering an apocalyptic event as they attempt to escape their woodland retreat, the leaders are tasked with drafting a provisional statement to address a recent crisis affecting the world. The specifics of what exactly they’re meant to blandly reassure the global populace about are concealed so as to plausibly represent anything, though one of the funnier elements of this political pastiche is how Maddin and the Johnsons repeatedly pull the rug out from under themselves – whenever a coherent satirical ‘message’ seems to emerge from their surrealist vignettes, it’s quickly derailed for a goofy gag.
There’s a sense to which Rumours is a one-joke movie, that joke being turning the supposed adults in the room into distracted, clueless kids. But if some viewers can still cling onto The West Wing as a comfort watch even now, there’s something to be said for the appeal of a text offering the total flip side in its portrayal of centrism’s capabilities, especially one as full of punkish spirit as this.
Little White Lies is committed to championing great movies and the talented people who make them.
Published 6 Dec 2024
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