'Rumours' Review: Diplomacy Gets Primitive in Quilted G-7 Satire

If you're curious about what really happens when world leaders meet to reach consensus on global issues, read a book about it. But if, given our current geopolitical reality, you imagine a cross between cabin-in-the-woods horror and a high-school soap opera, then the delightfully absurd, Buñuelian “Rumours,” co-directed by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, may strike you as a documentary to your anxious mind.

The trio of Canadian filmmakers is known for their cinematic fantasies (“The Forbidden Room,” “The Green Fog”), and “Rumors” is closer to a sketch idea stretched into a star-studded feature film. It's certainly made for these (end) times: lushly surreal, cynically tickling nonsense about the ineffectiveness of political summits as apocalyptic fears mount. Somewhere, the aforementioned Spanish director behind “The Exterminating Angel” nods wryly at the idea of ​​a satire about the G-7 leaders set in a peat bog filled with mummified zombies.

After a tidy, pompous Wes Anderson-style opening introducing our fictional septet of epically shallow national leaders, the hard work of chatty collaboration and managing petty neuroses begins. The host of the lakeside round table is Hilda, the elegant, poised and manipulative German chancellor played by Cate Blanchett, sitting next to her temperamental opposite, Canadian Prime Minister Maxime (Roy Dupuis, hilarious), a passionately brooding gray fox, too sensitive and tinged with scandal. . Early on, we learn that Maxime entered into a different kind of international relations with the nervous and polite British Minister Cardosa (Nikki Amuka-Bird), but to his dismay, Maxime moved on.

Completing this list of dignitaries is the elderly American president (Charles Dance), who, in an illogical gesture never explained, sports a British accent; the intellectually aggrandized and incapacitated head of state of France (Denis Menochet), who is eventually transported in a wheelbarrow; and ever-accommodating leaders of Japan (Takehiro Hida of “Shogun”) and Italy (Rolando Rovello), whose screen time roughly correlates with the little-brother attention these countries receive on any given news day.

Everyone's goal is a provisional statement on a crisis never articulated. But sentimental pride in their “leadership burden,” meaningless vacillations, and growing fear that the environment holds imminent doom for them personally, make it impossible to even work out the usual gibberish. And, in fact, little actually happens in screenwriter Evan Johnson's mix of lowbrow humor and high-concept wit, beyond the straight-faced delivery of bursts of ridiculous dialogue and strange encounters with the self-indulgent swamp people. Finally, a shiny one, the size of a car. brain. They also encounter a disheveled former colleague (Alicia Vikander) who delivers a message of revolutionary doom, but in a different language that they barely bother to recognize.

On the other hand, what matters is all the bickering, distraction, and reliably self-preserving ignorance toward the catastrophe that is hot on their heels. Thanks to the cast's deadpan skills, the low-grade silliness is funny enough to offset the occasional feeling that a shorter, tighter version built around its biggest laughs might have been more effective. (Still, he has more fun with human foibles than with the cocky howl of “Don't Look Up.”)

“Rumours” also benefits from Maddin's campy, genre-specific DNA, especially in Stefan Ciupek's pulsating cinematography, which combines mid-century melodrama with a thick, thick monster matinee. It's also a reminder that the nuclear age of the 1950s was the last great cinematic era that turned universal horror into a gleefully schizoid movie for audiences. Hopefully, “Rumours” can usher in a new era of gonzo entertainment, we all laugh together in fear.