Guy Maddin’s Surreal Summit at the End of the World

Between its isolated setting, discreetly charming characters, and ultra-bourgeois trappings, Rumours is clearly a movie made under the sign of Luis Buñuel, the Spanish master whose shadow falls over nearly a century’s worth of cinematic absurdism, including Maddin’s. The most distinctive filmmaker ever to emerge from the frozen tundra of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Maddin has been practicing his form of handmade, heart-on-sleeve surrealism since the mid-1980s. For the uninitiated, a good place to start would be 2000’s ecstatic, award-winning short The Heart of the World, which compresses an epic narrative about love, capitalism, and incipient apocalypse into six whipcrack minutes, or perhaps 2007’s autofictional My Winnipeg, a phantasmagorical exercise in personal and civic portraiture narrated by Maddin himself and canonized by no less than the Criterion Collection. If David Cronenberg is English-Canadian cinema’s reigning contemporary master, Maddin is something like its weirdo-intellectual jester, cheerfully spelunking through his own cluttered subconscious in a series of shorts, features, and gallery installations.

Before Rumours, Maddin’s highest-profile muse was probably Isabella Rossellini, who memorably adorned 2003’s black-and-white melodrama pastiche The Saddest Music in the World as a Depression-era beer baroness propped up by prosthetic legs filled with lager. For his latest, though, he’s recruited no less than Cate Blanchett, who’s also listed as an executive producer, and whose casting as a sleekly coiffed, impeccably accented German chancellor is something in between a stunt and a coup. After playing Lydia Tár, where could she go except straight to Angela Merkel?

It’s pretty evident early on that none of Rumours’ major characters are meant to be direct stand-ins for actually existing world leaders, although the tendency of Charles Dance’s U.S. president to nod off mid-anecdote could be perceived as a jab at Sleepy Joe Biden (his accent, meanwhile, is pretty far from Delaware—closer to Westeros). Instead, Maddin, Johnson, and Johnson are capering in the realm of nationalistic caricature, conceiving each of their protagonists as exaggerated embodiments of various social or cultural traditions: hence the portly French president (Denis Ménochet) with his untethered flights of poetic pretentiousness, or the revelation that the Italian premier (Rolando Ravello) likes cosplaying as Mussolini, and also keeps scraps of charcuterie in his breast pocket for round-the-clock snacking purposes.