MIFF Session #7: RUMOURS

When your movies are as signature as Guy Maddin's the slightest deviation in style will send the fanbase into conniptions and seizures. Maddin made his career with films that looked like they were shot in 1911 with audio from 1927. Often overlooked in this aesthetic is how the dialogue and actions of the characters were a lot bolder than that suggested. But there was a cosiness attached to the dawn of cinema world we entered at the Maddin by-line. So, when the G7 world leaders lined up in the opening shot of Rumours in crisp digital video and vibrant colour, I thought: oh crikey, what will the fans be thinkin'?

It would be remiss of me to omit the presence of recent collaborators Evan and Galen Johnson who were to varying degrees standing beside Maddin in the creative control bit of the credits. The screenplay for Rumours is credited solely to Evan Johnson. A brief title sequence seems to suggest the kind of old movie world building but when it zaps back to contemporary clarity that short glimpse is the anomaly.

I'm going to do something unusual for me, simply because it says it all in a few words. The IMDB synopsis goes like this: "The leaders of seven wealthy democracies get lost in the woods while drafting a statement on a global crisis, facing danger as they attempt to find their way out." That pretty much tells you all you need to know, including the irony at the heart of the film.

The leaders struggle to concoct the statement they need to assure the waiting world that the worst will be met with the best. At dinner, they fall prey to the food and wine or mentally wander, rendering them incapable of doing more than expressing a kind of writer's block gibberish. When the servants vanish and the dignitaries appear to be alone, they take to the path through the surrounding woods to get back to civilisation, workshopping the statement without success, while joining in the recitation of a previous statement as though it's an old school song. There are forces and figures in the woods like a giant brain, a diplomat who can now only communicate in Swedish and a gaggle of self-pleasuring zombies. What does it all mean? The ending ties the bows and presents a logical conclusion.

The conventionality of the look appears well before the halfway mark to oppose the absurdism of the situation. These people who are remote from the effects of whatever crisis rages outside of their bubble, who are confounded by the task of reassurance, even one as tokenistic as this, is the stuff of fairytales and the concluding address has a dream logic strangeness to it which feels oddly comforting.

The audience around me included a lot of titterers. I always offer doubt with this:  maybe they are seeing something funny which is bypassing me completely. All too often, it's down to either an unfamiliarity with the type of film they got vs what they expected, or that they expected so much from what they knew that they turned the laughter switch on to automatic, set and forget. There is a wealth of humour in Rumours but it's not Flying High with a belly laugh in every line. If they are responding like that because Guy Maddin films bring that out in them then maybe he should return to the old look and feel. But that would only threaten him with stasis and saturation. This is an enjoyable film from beginning to end but it got me thinking about what are probably the wrong things.