Cate Blanchett may only now be playing a world leader, but this international icon is already ruling 2024.
The actress leads “Rumours,” which premiered at Cannes and will go on to screen at TIFF and NYFF. The feature is the latest collaboration between Guy Maddin and brothers Evan and Galen Johnson after “The Forbidden Room” in 2015. The trio co-wrote and directed the political satire film that is billed as being a combination of “comedy, apocalyptic horror, and swooning soap opera” per the logline.
“Rumours” follows the seven leaders of the world’s wealthiest democracies at the annual G7 summit, which is hosted by Blanchett’s character, the Chancellor of Germany. The international politicians are tasked with drafting a provisional statement regarding a global crisis while at the summit; of course, things go awry.
The official synopsis teases: “These so-called leaders become spectacles of incompetence, contending with increasingly surreal obstacles in the mist woods as night falls and they realize they are suddenly alone. A genre-hopping satire of political ineptitude, the latest film from incomparable directors Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson is a journey into the absurd heat of power and institutional failure in a slowly burning world.”
Alicia Vikander, Charles Dance, Roy Dupuis, Nikki Amuka- Bird, Takehiro Hira, Denis Ménochet, Rolando Ravello, and Zlatko Burić co-star.
Writer/director Evan Johnson said in the press notes that real-life summits already have an “inherent cartoon-like or fictional quality.” In fact, “Rumours” actually is an expanded subplot of a different film the trio of filmmakers have in the works.
Of the ensemble cast, Johnson said: “They knew their characters, and they knew what their characters would do. And they were very defensive of them, ‘My character wouldn’t do that,’ so then you put them together and then they just went with it. They’re just all so great, so full of ideas, so raring to go over and over again.”
Maddin shared that “Rumours” specifically channels B-movie elements, such as including a massive AI brain that’s the size of a Volkswagen.
IndieWire critic David Ehrlich referenced the welcomed pulpiness of certain plot elements, writing that the film shifts from “soap opera into a B-movie,” especially when the “AI chatbot is maybe the most acutely hilarious thing that Maddin and the Johnsons have ever put on screen.” Ehrlich deemed the feature “dryly hilarious” and a festival favorite. Read the full review here.
