Cannes 2024: Rumours

Rumours is a comedy about politics and our inability to face the obvious before it's too late. It features great actors playing broad parts in increasingly broad sequences, and it lasts almost two full hours. By the end, the satire is stretched so thin it couldn't cut freshly baked bread.

The setting is a G7 summit, where leaders of great world powers have come to draft a proclamation about an unspecified climate event. They're not here to take action or even make promises of doing something, the declaration itself is all that matters: the pomp and circumstance. Naturally, the leaders can't draft this remotely in an office or a city. No, they must find a secluded place on the grounds of a ludicrously opulent mansion - as if to prove to themselves that what they're doing matters. If it didn't, surely they wouldn't be in such a grandiose environment?

The first half hour is so strong that all other disappointments feel palatable. It's not quite Veep nor In the Thick of It, but it has the same farcical joy in seeing talented actors take the piss out of people in power.

Cate Blanchett is hilarious as a fictional German chancellor, who tries and often fails to maintain an air of amiability despite thinking herself better than those around her. Charles Dance is oddly cast as the President of the United States and has way too little to do with the part, but what there is is surprisingly good. Roy Dupuis, however, steals the show as the Canadian lothario who has slept with every woman in sight.

When the cast lets loose together, Rumours works like gangbusters. No matter the material, it's always a pleasure to see pompous jerks lost in the most mundane tasks. Doubly so when they lack the self-awareness to realize how little their presence is missed.

Around halfway through, Rumours takes a hard turn into a George Romero-style genre. We don't know what's going on, except there are masturbating zombies, a gigantic brain, and lots of wandering around in the woods of Bavaria.

It's all intentionally wacky and nonsensical, and that's all fine up to a point. But Rumours plays out the same joke over and over for the next hour and runs out of juice well before the limp finale. It's weird to call what is effectively a shaggy dog story boring because that's the nature of their joke, yet here we are.

And yet, there's so much to enjoy in this wildly bizarre romp. Everyone seems to be having a lot of fun, and sometimes that's enough. Director Guy Maddin is nothing if unconventional and his directorial choices range between slapstick and Werner Herzog-style operatic melodrama. Even when the script fails to land, Maddin does something so audacious and silly that it's still mesmerizing.

It's not always good, but it's never bad either. Instead, it's a curiosity. An odd duck that's neither here nor there. As such, it's worth seeing just so you too can sit there, fascinated and confused, like the rest of us, and join in a collective: "Huh."