Cate Blanchett wants you to laugh at politics in ‘Rumours’

You’d be hard pressed to find an upcoming film weirder than “Rumours.” The biting commentary on the emptiness of political statements and the performances politicians put on starts off as a straight political satire focusing on the G7 world leaders, but then slips into a world of slow-yet-terrifying zombies; a mysterious, giant brain found in the middle of a forest with unexplained origins; and an AI chatbot bent on sexual entrapment. It goes from provocative to absurd within a few short scenes, with the G7 leaders no longer the subject of criticism, but the butt of the joke. And that’s kind of the whole point, according to its star and executive producer, Cate Blanchett.

“We’re all in such a state of heightened anxiety and fear with what’s going on with climate, what’s going on with the global political situation. We feel like we’re on the precipice of a world war and there’s a lot of people in positions of power who seem to be relishing that moment,” Blanchett told The Associated Press. She plays a fictional chancellor of Germany named Hilda Orlmann, the host of the conference who’s more focused on optics than action. “I think the audience will come to it with a need for some kind of catharsis. And because the film is ridiculous and terrifying ... I think they’ll be able to laugh at the absurdity of the situation we found ourselves in. I think it’s a very generous film in that way,” she said.

The three directors, Guy Maddin and brothers Evan and Galen Johnson, said they wanted the film to feel like it had a “generic wash of political disrespect” and to include some resonant critiques, but they didn’t want viewers to feel like they were leaving a lecture hall as they walked out of the theatre. “I’m preachy enough when I talk to people. I don’t want to make a movie that’s preachy, you know? I just favour movies that aren’t that. That just hit me with a little mystery of ... ‘What are you doing or seeing? What am I experiencing?’” Evan Johnson, who wrote the script, as well as co-directed, said.

As for the more absurd plotlines, Maddin said he and his collaborators share “a compulsion to come up with an original recipe.” And original it certainly is. In its straightforward opening act, leaders from the Group of 7 meet for their annual summit and try to draft a provisional statement for an unnamed crisis. Then, as the evening goes on and they struggle to string together a couple, meaningful sentences, they find themselves abandoned and subject to attack from “bog people,” or well-preserved mummified bodies from thousands of years ago. Hijinks — and hilarity — ensue from there.

Nikki Amuka-Bird, who plays the fictionalised British Prime Minister Cardosa Dewindt, said that while reading the script, she kept asking herself, “What’s happening?” But the ridiculous plotline — including the apocalyptic invasion of zombie-like “bog people” — was only part of the reason why she took on the project. “This kind of total courage to genre splice in this way takes away any kind of apprehension or fear you might have about it because their (the directors’) tongues are firmly in their cheeks the whole time,” Amuka-Bird said. “It’s a really imaginative exercise and it’s just fantastic to work with directors who can be that bold and take chances like that.”

The cast is rounded out by a starry ensemble: Roy Dupuis is a melodramatic Canadian prime minister, Charles Dance is an American president with an inexplicable British accent, Denis Ménochet is a paranoid French president and Alicia Vikander makes an appearance as a frenetic leader from the European Commission. The title of the movie, Blanchett said, is meant to invoke the revered Fleetwood Mac album of the same name, which was made at a time when the bandmembers were reportedly “all sleeping together and bickering and breaking up,” she said. “What was surprising about it is you think, ‘OK, this is a film about the G7,’ but it’s like a sort of a daytime soap opera with these sort of trysts and liaisons and petty squabbles,” Blanchett said. “It was such an unusual way to look at the mess we’re all in and the leadership that’s led us here.”

Associated Press