Hyde Park Pick: Rumours
Rumours, a delightfully odd political satire, is this week's Hyde Park Pick.
Robb Barham
People are odd. Politics is odder. Rumours is, happily, even odder.
A prolific Canadian director with a deep appreciation of silent and experimental cinema and artist of singular eccentricity, Guy Maddin teamed up with filmmakers Evan and Galen Johnson in 2011. Since then they’ve brought us the incomparable The Forbidden Room (2015) and The Green Fog (2017) and now return with a delightful political satire, shot through with their signature surrealism and esoteric playfulness.
Whilst on the face of it there’s a simplicity in their approach to global politics (who’d’ve thought our ‘leaders’ could be self-indulgent, self-regardingly inept fools?), there is so much more going on as the film unfolds. Once left to their own devices, the leaders’ empty platitudes, as they concoct a banal summit statement, ring as hollow and off the right path as they become lost in the surrounding woods, their circumstances (state of affairs?) and our world, darkening.
From there, the events and occurrences take on a more earthy, chaotic and visceral nature as the leaders’ cloistered and protected world rubs up against ours. Reanimated Iron Age bog bodies onanistically cavort around a fire, the Secretary-General of the European Commission (a sublime cameo from Alicia Vikander) converses with a giant brain and the writers continually take subtle jabs at the politicians and (understandably) the Canadian Prime Minister in particular.
To support this wilful ribaldry the filmmakers have gathered a wonderful cast of bickering politicians, amongst them Cate Blanchett’s salacious German Chancellor, Nikki Amuka-Bird’s prim Prime Minister and Charles Dance’s soporific American President, who sports a straight English accent for no reason whatsoever. Sometimes the film is darkly funny just for darkly funny’s sake and what’s not to like about that?
Exuberant, mischievous and inventive in both its script and cinematography, Rumours perhaps reflects our strange world more than we might ourselves admit and presents a perfect opportunity to enjoy a spirited defence of how brilliantly creative and weird the cinema experience can be, an opportunity to fully embrace the odd in all its wonder.
Rumours is showing daily at HPPH from Fri 06 Dec. Book tickets here.
