Critic Reviews

The premise sounds as though it must invite a satirical reading, and there are many well-aimed ironic jabs at aspects of the leaders’ national character and the box-ticking rigmarole of modern politics. But directors Guy Maddin and brothers Evan and Galen Johnson – three beloved cult Canadian experimentalists – also poke fun at the notion that their intentions could be so clean-cut.

However you define it, it’s globally good fun.

Sporadically ingenious, occasionally chilling and entirely bonkers, Rumours sees Maddin (writing and directing with his longtime collaborators Evan and Galen Johnson) abandoning his more familiar black-and-white, silent-film aesthetic for vibrant color.

An experiment in prestige quirk, Maddin and the Johnsons’ film isn’t as interested in satirizing the complex and frustrating nature of geopolitics as they are in using the material to unload a heaping load of gags ranging from the scatological to the philosophical.

The danger of movies based on conceptual wit is that they will lose steam as things proceed and the filmmakers run out of ideas. Thankfully, Maddin and the Johnsons effectively develop their story — goofy and absurd though it may be — so that these constant digs at our ineffectual leaders do coalesce into something meaningful and alarming.

The massed foibles and outright idiocies of the seven principals — all sharp individual comic creations, but collectively a devastating hot-air hydra of enfeebled contemporary democracy — add up to a frustrated protest against our elected elite fiddling while Rome (or the planet, rather) burns, offering mealy-mouthed sentiments that gesture toward coordinated action without ever getting there.

Rumours is a strange brew, but there’s a lot of fun to be had if you like its flavour.

Thanks to the deadpan chops of the cast, 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.

The film is winningly defined by its peculiar admixture of national pride and self-deprecation.

Even in these early scenes, a strangeness pervades the film: ironic, sometimes stagey or soapy, occasionally punctuated by over-the-top musical cues.