When the zombie apocalypse comes, the political animals leading the Western democracies will be powerless to stop it.
That’s the big message of “Rumours,” a dry, fitfully amusing horror satire of the ineffectual, word-parsing diplomat-speech of G-7 leadership in the face of the “present crisis.”
Three directors from the Canadian avante garde — Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson (who also scripted) and Galen Johnson — who previously joined forces for “The Green Fog,” team up for this uneven “festival darling” of a comedy about national archetypes, useless talk and the perils of AI and masturbating “Bog People” (bodies buried in peat) come back to life.
Zombies aren’t what gather the leaders of France (Denis Ménochet), Britain (Nikki Amuka-Bird), Japan (Takehiro Hira), Canada (Roy Dupuis), Italy (Rolando Ravello and the United States (Charles Dance) to a summit hosted by the German PM (Cate Blanchett) in a remote German castle resort.
Their endless posing for photographs and the distractions of aides and the press aren’t helping them grapple with the “crisis,” which we gather is the real world dilemma of climate-change fueled mass migration.
The pedantic Frenchman, the officious German and Brit and the just-glad-to-be-here Japanese leader fret over getting started on the “Provisional Statement on the Present Crisis,” a “group of seven” pre-agreement agreement supporting “rules based multi-lateral order human rights” and demoaning “procrastination pitstops.”
Say again?
As the Italian’s a ditz, the American’s a sleepy, ancient patrician and the Canadian a depressed, horny moon-eyed romantic, we do wonder if anything at all will get done, not that their bland platitudes mean anything or drive change in the middle of an emergency.
An anthropoligist is digging up an emasculated and executed bog body nearby, and that’s our cue that something is about to distract these seven very human people from their gossip over who is going through a marriage crisis, who is about to step down, who slept with whom and what’s in the swag bags that these affairs always deliver.
Their phone service ends and the servants vanish and the coddled and cosseted leaders of the Free World Western democracies are forced to fend for themselves and organize their escape.
They’ve been attacked? “Protesters!” Well, “dark shadowy figures”
And they “attacked,” you say? “Well, loomed menacingly!”
All the brooding about which PM rejected which PM’s hopes of resuming their affair, of writing something that rivals the “perfect,” unifying language of the Maastrict Treaty, German tone-deafness over race and immigration will have to wait.
Only it doesn’t. Our Frenchman obsesses over words and phrases, and takes on know-it-all tones when he launches into discourges on anthropology.
An EU leader (Alicia Vikander) shows up, frantic and chattering away.
Might this be ancient Dargin, Circassian, Lezgian, etc, the French polymath and the Japanese linguist ponder?
“It’s SWEDISH. She’s speaking Swedish.”
There’s humor and even pathos in the aged American leader of the “world’s oldest democracy” as President Edison Walcott drops offhanded reference to the indiginities of aged manhood, now and among the bog people. No, Dance’s accent isn’t American, not even John Kerry patrician.
The Frenchman’s a tad cowardly and quick to lay stake to enfeebled, and becomes the dead weight the others haul around in a wheel barrow. A bit on the nose.
The French Canadian may have slept with every woman there, or perhaps he’ll just get around to them all eventually.
And the monsters? They’re a string of dick jokes and masturbation gags that are anything but “rock’n roll.”
The fiddling-while-Earth-burns nature of global “leadership” and their parade of useless and vacuous “statements” joke lands, and is then pounded repeatedly as almost all of these leaders, scrambling through a foggy forest at night, fearing bog zombies and a planet about to go up in flames, struggle to stay on task and come up with that “statement.”
As does the movie. It makes its one point, and everything else is — well — masturbation.
Rating: R, sexual situations, violence
Cast: Cate Blanchett, Nikki Amuka-Bird,
Denis Ménochet, Takehiro Hira, Roy Dupuis, Rolando Ravello, Charles Dance and Alicia Vikander.
Credits: Directed by Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson and Guy Maddin, scripted by Evan Johnson. A Bleecker Street release.
Running time: 1:44
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