CBlanchett is having a wonderful moment at this year’s film festival; for Brits, a certain age, anyway. His character reverently invokes the name of the late Roy Jenkins, the great laborer and former chancellor of both the treasurer and the university of Oxford. Blanchett plays a German chancellor named Hilda Ortmann, whom Jenkins remembers as the first president of the European Commission to be allowed to attend the G7 summit (which, as political trivia would say, is “one for the heads”), perhaps in the next film. Blanchett can make a great speech about Peter Shore.
The Rumor is an absurdist sketch comedy, co-written and directed by Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin with his longtime collaborators, brothers Evan and Galen Johnson. The title was inspired by the 1977 Fleetwood Mac album because of the emotional crises that accompanied its memory. The setting is a forest in the Saxon town of Dankerode in Germany where the G7 poetic summit is taking place. The seven heads of government have gathered for an unspecified (but apparently ecological) crisis and a long and fantastically useless joint draft, which, as Hilda grumbles with her Frenchman, President Sylvain Broulez (Denis Ménochet), is quite vaguely worded. There is no specific action.
US President Edison Wolcott is getting old and sleepy; by Charles Dance, played in his confused English voice, and the script has a joke about Chorus unwilling (but certainly not able) to do an American accent. British PM Cardosa Dewindt (Nikki Amuka-Bird) confirmed that he had business at the summit of the G7 disturbed Canadian premier and man of ladies Maxime Laplace (Roy Dupuis), who also carries the torch to the European Commission secretary-general-Celestin Sproul. (Alice Vikander) and has a moment with Hilda. Rolando Ravello plays the stock Italian AM Antonio Lamorte and Takehiro Hira plays Tatsuro Iwesaki, the modest, shy Japanese premier.
Their Lake G7 dinner is thrown into crisis when they notice their phones aren’t working; the chateau HQ and perhaps the entire village have been abandoned and are now completely alone – except for the 2,000-year-old men buried in the mud of Dankerode, who now come to life, stumbling upon the site and masturbating furiously so that the resulting tsunami of seed will both extinguish the deadly fires and give birth to new enlightened men.
This is a very strange film, like a mixture of George A Romero with crime, detectiveless Agatha Christie, and maybe TS Eliot’s Cocktail Party. Blanchett shows that she is pretty good at playing comedy, leading the company in some very festive pieces. At dinner, he tells his six guests that the theme of this year’s climax is “sorry”, and tells them to now go around the table and say what they are most sorry for. Tatsuro says rather tactfully that he does not want to learn to ride a horse; Sylvain begins to choke back tears as he says he’s sorry he doesn’t really understand his father. It is clear that the rest of the crowd is feeling pressure to say something powerful or moving. Next is the president of Italy, who exclaims that he regrets having a party like Mussolini’s.
The rumor is crazy and confusing, with new forest fights and apocalyptic episodes. There is a truly amazing joke about an AI chatbot program designed to capture pedophiles. Hilda discovers the bags that each member of the G7 was supposed to get, and each one contains cyanide – this is just normal, she explains. Humorous because of the end of the world.