This is What I Expect from the G7

Film: Rumours
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on basement television.

Guy Maddin makes some crazy-ass movies. When I came across Rumours, I knew it was one I would want to get to eventually, and when a copy essentially fell into my lap, I figure it was better now than later. I had to watch this over a couple of days just because of life, but I think taking a break in the middle actually helped me. This isn’t a deep movie, but it’s one that you need to soak in for a bit to try to make some sense of.

Rumours is generally being classified as a horror comedy, and that’s probably the closest we’re going to get to an actual genre/sub-genre choice that makes sense. In reality, this is an absurdist film. It makes a certain bizarre sense, but only by forcing yourself to make some sense of it. It feels like a dreamscape that shows up after you’ve been eating a tray of brownies that you didn’t know had been altered by the baker, and, inconsolably high, you decide to sleep off the drugs. There’s a kind of through line of story, but all of this feels like dream logic and it doesn’t actually make a great deal of sense.

We’re going to start at a G7 conference where the leaders of the world’s seven leading democracies are sitting down to discuss an unnamed global crisis. These leaders and their countries are: German leader Hilda Orlmann (Cate Blanchett), U.S. president Edison Wolcott (Charles Dance), French premier Sylvain Broulez (Denis Ménochet), Japanese leader Tatsuro Iwasaki (Takehiro Hira), Italian leader Antonio Lemorle (Rolando Rovello), British Prime Minister Cardosa Dewindt (Nikki Amuka-Bird), and Canadian leader Maxime LaPlace (Roy Dupuis). After a few photos, the group takes a walk and observes the archaeological site where a bog mummy has been found. Then the group all sit at a large table in a gazebo and starts to talk about their upcoming resolution.

The problem is that they have all set foot in the Twilight Zone. While the group splits up into three smaller groups to work on different parts of the resolution. It then becomes evident that everyone else at the conference has vanished. Some pages blow off the table and Sylvain goes to retrieve them. He returns an hour later, claiming that the bog mummy actually wrestled him. No one in the group has any service or bars, which means that nothing can be looked up and verified. Maxime runs off, despondent at both the impending failure of his marriage and the lack of a continued affair with Cardosa. Sylvain believes he has been infected by the bog mummies and his bones are becoming floppy. President Wolcott falls asleep and talks about his desire to be assassinated as a way to end his time in public office.

Eventually, Maxime discovers Celestine Sproul (Alicia Vikander), a representative of the EU and one of his former conquests, who is out in the forest surrounding the G7’s gazebo, going through her papers in the company of a gigantic human brain. She is also suddenly speaking Swedish for some reason. The entire crew attempts to find a ferry to get them all back to the chateau where the meeting originated, with Sylvian being pushed in a wheelbarrow, and with outside help possibly coming from a chatbot designed to seek out sexual predators online.

Through all of this, the various members discuss the resolution that the G7 participants will be writing and presenting to the world about the unnamed crisis they are experiencing, which appears to be a crisis that is different from the one involving bog mummies and hatchback-sized human brains. At all times, the discussions of that resolution appear to be high-minded and important, and the various leaders are deeply involved with how critical these ideas are, but when actually discussed turn out to be platitudes, therapy sessions from Maxime’s failing marriage, Wolcott’s ramblings while dozing, and a plan to build Europe’s largest sundial.

Does any of this make sense? It’s not supposed to. You can sum this up with the fact that Charles Dance, who can pull of an American accent, plays the American president with his natural British accent.

That’s the point—the entire point of Rumours is that the people who are supposed to be in charge are idiots. None of them know what they are doing or how to solve an actual problem, and everything that they attempt to do ends up being meaningless flailing, beating their heads against the problem and running off in the wrong direction. While this is a satire pointed at government, it certainly seems to be equally an indictment on corporatism and incompetence in positions of power in general.

All of this culminates in the reading of the actual resolution, which only confirms the intent of the film up to that point. Rumors gives us a collection of world leaders who end their story much like a two-year-old who is proud of the shit they took in their diaper.

This is a hard movie to recommend, but it’s fascinating if you go into it with the right mindset.

Why to watch Rumors: It is one weird snickerdoodle of a movie.
Why not to watch: You’re never really going to understand what is happening.