By M. Faust

Every once in a while (not nearly often enough), I come across a movie that is best enjoyed if you know as little as possible about it before you see it.

Rumours is one of these: if you’re up for a movie this week and willing to take a chance on something different, stop reading now. You may not like it; you may find yourself walking out of the theater scratching your head and wondering, “What the hell did I just watch?” But you won’t be bored. (Well, maybe a little bored during some stretches, but that’s not so bad.) 

By no means should you look for the film’s trailer online. It gives away several of the movie’s best visual gags. 

Not willing to take my word for it? Can’t say that I blame you. Will it help if I tell you that this was written and directed by Guy Maddin, the veteran filmmaker from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada? If you know the name at all, your first reaction is likely to be, “There’s a Guy Maddin movie in multiplexes? How the hell did that happen?” For nearly 40 years, largely with the help of the patiently indulgent Canadian government, Maddin has been producing features and shorts that are most notable for playing with the tropes of silent movies. Rumours, made with his of-late regular collaborators Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, isn’t like any of those. 

(You could call Maddin the Canadian David Lynch, but that’s only helpful if you’re familiar with his work.) 

(As long as I’m letting the parenthetical asides get out of control, this is as good a place as any to mention that a number of Maddin’s features were written by Hamburg native George Toles, brother of Tom Toles, Pulitizer prize-winning editorial cartoonist for the Buffalo News.)

Not enough to get you to the theater? OK. Rumours looks at an imaginary meeting of the G7, the group of seven world leaders who occasionally meet to hammer out a statement that seldom has much effect on anything. This particular summit is prompted by a global crisis that we never learn anything about, but then, there’s always some kind of global crisis going on. It is interrupted by another crisis about which we also do not learn much, though it seems to be apocalyptic. Like the dead rising from their graves apocalyptic. 

Before we get to that, Rumours makes clear that it has no faith in this bunch’s abilities to solve anything. They can’t even handle their own sexual tensions, cued by some gleefully sleazy sax on the soundtrack. And when things do break down in a very low-budget way, their reactions are as ill-advised as the cast of any Friday the 13^th sequel. 

The seven world leaders are played with only passingly similarities to their real life counterparts by a top international cast, including Cate Blanchett (Germany, the host country); Charles Dance, making no effort to modify his British accent to play the President of the United States; Roy Dupuis (Canada); Denis Ménochet (France); Nikki Amuka-Bird (the UK); Takehiro Hira (Japan); Rolando Ravello (Italy); and Alicia Vikander (European Commission). If you’re counting, that makes eight: the European Commission is a sort of uninvited but expected guest and therefore arrives halfway into the movie. 

As silly as it is baffling, Rumours steadfastly resists any efforts to shoehorn it into a genre. It isn’t quite parody, and as political satire it’s pretty ham-fisted. At odd moments it’s even a bit scary. It is very reminiscent of Luis Bunuel—think The Exterminating Angel or The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise—but that’s just me showing off that I went to film school. One character posits, “Do you think it might be illuminating to consider this situation as an allegory?” This is the filmmakers’ way of letting us know that what we are watching is in no way an allegory. 

If I seem to be rambling all over the place without doing anything to get you to see Rumours, all I have left is this: I double dog dare you to see this movie.