Rumours: Cate Blanchett and a really big brain

One of Australia’s finest actors, Cate Blanchett nevertheless copped a fair whack of flack for her dubious ‘Russian’ accent work as Soviet agent Irina Spalko in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. We can neither confirm nor deny that this is why Steven Spielberg moved on from the franchise, passing the baton to Dial of Destiny helmer James Mangold.

A surer hand at feigning American, from her turn as socialite Meredith Logue in The Talented Mr Ripley, plus English, as the titular monarch in Elizabeth, no less, she tries on German-accented English (after dabbling in Tár) for Canadian director Guy Maddin and his collaborators, filmmaking siblings Evan and Galen Johnson.

With hints of Angela Merkel, but saucier, Blanchett depicts fictional Chancellor of Germany Hilda Orlmann in their allegorical apocalypse movie Rumours, but don’t listen to the tittle-tattle. There are no falling comets, alien invaders or old-fashioned floods here. There is a hint of climate collapse, but it mostly happens off-camera.

Instead, Orlmann’s hosting her fellow G7 leaders in a civilised dinner under a forest-adjacent rotunda to compose a communiqué loosely addressing the nebulously inferred crises of the day, but not in such a way that would commit them to taking any meaningful steps. As bits on meaningless political waffle and the more insidious failings of leaders who refuse to stand tall when required, it’s en pointe (French accent optional).

Forest beat

Speaking of (legit) French accents, Denis Ménochet (Custody, Inglourious Basterds) depicts low-key, sweet Gallic president Sylvain Broulez. Fond of thinking poetically, his contributions to the communiqué, however, are no less muddled. He’s joined by French-Canadian actor Roy Dupuis (Screamers) as top-knotted and suavely suited womanizer Maxime Laplace, the Trudeau-inspired Canuck Prime Minster who feels his feelings more than most, with the triumvirate of Canadian directors clearly enjoying playing up to stereotypes of their nation.

Laplace treats the G7 as his own personal dating pool, much to an overtly manoeuvring Orlmann’s delight. British Prime Minister Cardosa Dewindt, played by an Avenue 5 actor Nikki Amuka-Bird, is less impressed, batting away his attentions (though not before having indulged previously).

Actor and fellow filmmaker Rolando Ravello is also cast appropriately as the new kid on the political block, Italian PM Antonio Lamorle, who is fond of dispensing salami snaffled from the buffet, rather than locally sourced at home. He’s not quite as shortchanged as outstanding Shogun actor Takehiro Hira as the Japanese PM, Tatsuro Iwasaki, who doesn’t get much of a look in.

Blanchett’s is not the wildest accent swing, however. Game of Thrones villain Charles Dance, in a move redolent of the late Sean Connery, steadfastly hangs on to his plummy received pronunciation to depict American President Edison Wolcott. Indeed, in an off-the-wall film littered with not-so-subtle rib-pokes at national identities, the moment one of the gang is motivated to ask what’s going on with accent and the conversation’s promptly derailed without an answer is one of Rumours’ best beats.

Midsummer emptiness

It soon becomes clear that the euphemistically empty proclamation-spouting world leaders have been abandoned without the phalanx of glad-handing handlers to which they have become accustomed. And yet they are primarily concerned by the lack of wine top-ups, rather than the sky glowing blood red or freshly uncovered by archaeological endeavour bog people who are somehow reanimated only to masturbate prolifically.

Even the discovery of a giant brain deep in the woods within which they become hopelessly lost and the fairytale-like awakening of Alica Vikander’s portentous prophecy spouting European Union head Celestine Sproul elicits precious little eyebrow-raising – top marks for Blanchett’s deadpan when Orlmann points out Sproul is not, in fact, speaking gibberish but actually her native Swedish tongue.

These are profoundly uninterested and uninteresting people, the platitude-spraffing leaders we’re all too used to being let down by. But is the film Maddin and the Johnsons builds around them intriguing in its laceration of their emptiness?

For the most part, yes. Shot on location in Hungary, there’s a wild energy to Rumours’ erratic heart that its intoxicatingly artificial forest setting amplifies, all misty ennui ably captured by cinematographer Stefan Ciupek and further teased out by Melancholia composer Kristian Eidnes Andersen’s deliberately provocative score, slipping between horror and Mills & Boon.

Costume designer Bina Daigeler has the political formal wear (and Laplace’s unbuttoning of it) down to a tee. Depuis has a ball depicting a soft porn-ready Canadian stud, with the perfunctory nature of his pairing with Blanchett pitch perfect. Amuka-Bird’s exasperation is equally droll.

Maddin and the Johnson bros’ hardly coded messaging works as well as any children’s story told through the ages, even if the film’s decidedly un-family friendly. Neither quite as whacky nor as sharp as it could stand to be, Rumours is never not intriguing. Stirring in the more farcical elements of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream with a pinch of Armando Iannucci’s whip-smart political satire The Thick of It and a dash of folkloric horror, it’s a heady brew worth imbibing.

Rumours is currently showing as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival.