Burl reviews Rumours! (2024)

 

Ha ha and holyoake, it’s Burl, here making a brief return to reviewing, and who knows for how long! I’m here to review a picture I saw recently: the latest project from Guy Maddin, who brought us Careful and several others, working here in concert with two brothers named Johnson! The picture is a bosky little number called Rumours!

 

That bosky quality, along with the limited cast populated with a few well-known ringers, a generally oneiric quality to the goings-on, and a formal approach that, for Maddin, is strikingly mainstream, all reminded me powerfully of one of the filmmaker’s most misbegotten projects, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs! Ha ha, the more I think about it, the more similar the two pictures seem, although Rumours is clearly the more successful!

 

The story has a late-period Buñuelian quality to it: that dreamlike feeling of never being able to eat your dinner! The setting is a G7 meeting somewhere in rural Germany, where world leaders have gathered to hash out an obviously meaningless statement in response to “the present crisis,” which of course remains undefined! The host leader is the German Chancellor, Hilda, played by Cate Blanchett, well known from The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou; also in attendance are the Canadian prime minister, Maxime, essayed by swarthy Roy Dupuis, who has played such Canadian icons as General Romeo Dallaire and Maurice “Rocket” Richard, but whom I myself know best from movies like Jesus of Montreal and Screamers; the dozy American president played by the world’s most British man, Charles Dance from Alien 3 and For Your Eyes Only; the British prime minister, Cardosa, played by Nikki Amuka-Bird, who was in that crazy Jupiter Ascending as well as two of the more recent M. Night Shamalyan pictures; and the leaders of France, Japan, and Italy, played respectively by Denis Ménochet, Takehiro Hira, and Rolando Ravello! Alicia Vikander from Jason Bourne and The Green Knight and Zlatko Buric from 2012 also show up in extended cameo roles late in the picture!

 

The situation is this: they’re supposed to write, or rather “craft,” some kind of crisis-addressing statement, but can’t really get started with it, distracted as they are with romances, reminiscences, and the local jagoff mudmen! Ha ha! Every now and again someone will have a little brainstorm and jot a few things down, but nothing ever makes much sense and there’s no indication that it would be any help even if they could finish it off and present it to the world! Meanwhile the rest of the world seems to disappear and the leaders realize they’re on their own! A giant brain is discovered out in the woods, along with Alicia Vikander, who speaks in what is at first taken to be gibberish, but turns out to merely be Swedish! Unaccountably, the French President’s leg bones dissolve and he must be carried, or pushed in a wheelbarrow; meanwhile the Italian prime minister carries an inexhaustible supply of pocket meats! Their progress through the woods is as maddeningly slow, as pointless and seemingly circular as their efforts to write the statement; but in the end it all comes together in a glorious ejaculation of ineffectual nonsense!

 

Almost all of this takes place in dark woods punctuated with rock video lighting, and there is much gabbing and wry hilarity! One triumphant moment involving a rope ferry is scored to an Enya song, ha ha, and somehow the use of that song makes it one of the most amusing sequences in the whole picture! But of course there’s always a danger in trying to depict entropy and cyclical pointlessness in a movie: that the movie itself will become infected with these qualities; and it must be said that this is the case here, but, thank heavens, only occasionally! In the main it feels a bit like Maddin had the chance to remake Twilight of the Ice Nymphs but this time to make it more entertaining, and he, along with his Johnson brothers, made the most of this rare chance!

 

The analogies on offer are perhaps a bit broad, and the picture occasionally spins its wheels and could stand to dig in more deeply here and there, but it’s altogether a merry jape, well-acted by everybody, and is on balance a good deal of politically relevant fun! It’s not like much else you’ll see at the movies this year, and so I recommend it! I give Rumours three streams of two-century old urine! Ha ha!