Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.A solemn title card prefaces absurdist comedy Rumours, in which Cate Blanchett helps say goodbye to liberal democracy. Nonetheless, the leaders of the G7 nations are thanked for their support in the making of the movie. The joke grows funnier the more outlandish the film gets: rules-based order buried under knowing farce and bizarro pulp sci-fi.The movie exists beyond the looking glass, but don’t we all these days? The setting at least is real: Dankerode is an actual German village, although not one that has ever hosted a cast of world leaders for a G7 summit, as it does here. The chair is chancellor Hilda Ortmann, played by Blanchett without visibly straining to dispel thoughts of Angela Merkel.The US president is white-haired and sleepy, albeit played by Charles Dance with his English accent left in place as a note of comic nonsense. The prime ministers of the UK, Japan, Canada, France and Italy are more variably tied to real-life models.The conjurings of Joe Biden and Merkel create a mood of past tense. Still, Rumours comes out in the UK with Merkel’s memoir Freedom newly published: a promise to reveal political trade secrets of exactly the kind Rumours pokes fun at. Here, an unspecified crisis beyond Dankerode is nervously referenced — but once the leaders are alone, the dialogue drips with spoof gossip and faux-soapy melodrama. The film is co-directed by Guy Maddin (My Winnipeg), working with Evan and Galen Johnson. Maddin’s mannered experimental films can, I confess, make my teeth itch. With Rumours, too, there may be a point where the endless flippancy finds you recalling household chores you could be doing instead.Yet I ended up glad to have stayed, won round by the sheer delirium of the movie’s weirdness. The Dankerode woods soon fill with ancient bog zombies, while the apparent arrival of that wider crisis cranks up the satirical energy.At a certain level of power, the surest sign of disaster is a lack of staff. So it is that the G7 leaders realise an apocalypse has come to pass. Spads, PAs, PRs are gone. Left to fend for themselves, they are as children, though rather than descend into anarchy, they instead do something oddly poignant. Clinging to their official remit, they craft a statement. “Should we say something about the private sector?” Ortmann worries between upbeat word salads.The movie mocks the very idea of its own antics having deeper meaning. I think it protests too much. With the age of globalism seemingly creaking to a close, there is something wildly mordant about Rumours — a portrait of the last technocrats, still talking bilateral supply chain management as the skies crack open.★★★★☆In UK cinemas from December 6
