Bilateral management. Global jurisdiction. Intergovernmental grandiloquence. Two of these phrases come up directly in Rumours, the new film from Canadian surrealists Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson; the third describes the medium by which the others are conveyed. Like so much of Maddin and the Johnsons’ work, Rumours is “about” as much or as little as is seen in the eyes of its beholders, but one thing all of its viewers see, and then cannot unsee, is the primeval spectacle of reanimated bog bodies masturbating around a bonfire.
Rumours begins innocuously enough with a convention of the G7, represented by world leaders Hilda Ortmann (Cate Blanchett), Maxime Laplace (Roy Dupuis), Sylvain Broulez (Denis Ménochet), Cardose Dewindt (Nikki Amuka-Bird), Edison Wolcott (Charles Dance), Tatsuro Iwasaki (Takehiro Hira), Antonio Lamorte (Rolando Rovello), and, eventually, the bewildered Celestine Sproul (Alicia Vikander). The gang’s all together to bang out a provisional statement for an unspecified crisis of such gravity that must be addressed in a gazebo at the edge of a German forest, catered with fine food and wine.
Unsurprisingly, they tackle the challenge clumsily and with loaded buzz-speak, a folly pinpointed immediately by Edison. “I know these kinds of statements, and people pay no attention to them at all,” he tells Antonio. “What people want is concrete action, not vague promises or proposals, or strategies that promise people the Earth.” And then he falls asleep while Sylvain haplessly chases down his page of notes, blown into the bosk by an errant gust of wind.
The comedy of fools gives way to a Night of the Living Dead riff when the group, suddenly abandoned by their coteries of aides and security details, wanders into the woods looking for help, where they stumble upon a scene no amount of alcohol can wipe from their (or our) memory: a band of mud-slicked zombie-lite figures engaged in communal self-pleasure.
The sextet looks on in hushed disgust, as if looking away isn’t an option; trainwrecks are as trainwrecks do. The display is vulgar, but curious, and while the film doesn’t explicitly say so, the characters may realize that they’re gazing at a funhouse mirror: As the bog people conduct their wank session, so do the G7. Theirs just happens to involve hollow verbiage guaranteed to leave the intended global audience unsatisfied. Say what you like about the bog folks. At least they get off! That’s more of an accomplishment than even Maxime’s bold, dramatic speech in Rumours’ ending sequence, flirting with apocalypse. (Maxime may deserve more credit than that; all bog folk in earshot get a second wind as he bloviates.)
Rumours operates on obscurity and thrives in weirdness, prototypical qualities of the average Maddin-Johnson collaboration. That the plot is broadly accessible compared to those other works, comprising shorts like Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton, Stump the Guesser, and Seances, as well as 2015’s The Forbidden Room and 2017’s The Green Fog, is a punchline unto itself. A film where the G7 gathers to fulfill its purpose, then winds up lost in the wilderness and beset on all sides by terrors including the bog bodies, as well as a giant pulsating brain, does not, on paper, sound like popular entertainment.
It can’t be overstressed that this is a deeply absurd picture. But Maddin, the Johnsons, and their wonderful ensemble cast relish the absurdity. This lends Rumours a miraculous transparency: Whenever meaning feels out of reach, making the stretch is nonetheless a pleasure. The dialogue is fun. The actors are having a ball. The tonal shifts Maddin and the Johnsons take enjoy comical abruptness.
And the bawdy humor, against expectation, has weight. It has meaning. In 2024, we’re perhaps more primed than ever to translate a film like Rumours from grotesquerie into familiarity; we’re so cooked from living in a time where every breaking development in national and world politics feels seismic, and where every election is the most important in our lifetime, that film’s mockery of bureaucratic folly functions as a cathartic release valve. Sylvain, returning his peers after recovering his waterlogged and ruined notes, claims that what scant words he jotted down may have “brought forth into the world, and possibly the global community, some very good ideas for the statement.”
Ménochet nails the build-up to this pathetic self-aggrandizement with quiet affected humility; the movie pays off his efforts later on with the bog people, grunting, moaning, and gasping as they collectively flog the dolphin. Rumours plays the group’s reaction to the sight with revulsion, which is only natural, but the joke is on them. All of their talk leads to nothing; they’re figuratively jerking off. The bog people are literally jerking off, but in their pursuit of an orgasm, they actually do something: They put out the bonfire.
