February 16, 2025

By Jim Slotek

The most crestfallen person going into the filming of Rumours was apparently Cate Blanchett, a long-time fan of filmmaker Guy Maddin. The director had cast her as the German chancellor in the dark and strange G7-themed maybe-it’s-a-drama.

“I was so excited: ‘I’m finally going to Winnipeg!’” Blanchett told the New York Times. “I was so disappointed when they said, ‘No, Budapest.’”

It’s not something the Manitoba Visitors’ Bureau would tout. But in the minds of many who’ve never been there, Winnipeg is like Twin Peaks, Washington, but even stranger and darker, and more awash in arcane secrets – this courtesy of its appearances in Maddin’s films, especially the feverishly funny My Winnipeg (2007). His breakthrough film, Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), was set in an actual mainly-Icelandic town just north of the city.

Maybe credit a creative transfusion from now-regular co-directors Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson. But Rumours marks both a step up in production values and promotion, courtesy of executive producer Ari Aster. And it’s a first-time Maddin feature filmed on location somewhere other than the ’Peg.

“It’s bizarre leaving Winnipeg. Really bizarre, I recommend it,” Maddin quipped to me at a sit-down chat with the Johnsons during the Toronto International Film Festival.

(As for the brothers Johnson, they have become a regular fixture on Planet Maddin. Maddin last won the TFCA Rogers Best Canadian Film Award in 2015, for The Forbidden Room, which was co-directed by Evan with music by Galen. Rumours is nominated for the $50,000 Rogers prize this year alongside Shepherds and Universal Language.)

It’s easy to characterize Rumours by what it’s not. It is not an homage to German Expressionism or some other silver screen genre upon which Maddin has forged an entire art-house career. It is, in fact, very of the moment, contemporary in tone, with a group of fiddling-while-Rome-burns world leaders (including Roy Dupuis as a Canadian Prime Minister with a romantic history among the female heads-of-state) busily coming up with language for an agreement about an unspecified global crisis.

Still, it’s a strange film to be described as “mainstream.” The man had Isabella Rossellini play an amputee brewery mogul with beer-filled prosthetic legs in 2003’s The Saddest Music in the World (and followed it up in 2005 with My Dad is 100 Years Old, a short about Isabella’s father, Roberto Rossellini, in which the filmmaking legend was portrayed as a giant talking stomach).

Here, he stays on message as the G7 reps encounter – without explanation – animated Teutonic bog-mummies and a giant brain in the woods.

Released in 500 theatres – as opposed to the usual double or single digits – and promoted more than all Maddin’s other films combined (did we mention the Times sent a writer to Winnipeg?), Rumours is almost a sociological experiment to find the David Lynchian event-horizon between art films and commercial ones.

The trio’s choice to make a contemporary film is not in any way hindered by current events. (None will say precisely whose idea it was to make a feature about the G7 in the first place.)

Whatever apocalyptic event is taking place is a stand-in for any global crisis. Whatever “the current crisis” is they ambiguously repeatedly refer to, the First World leaders attempt to deflect, punt, or otherwise avoid dealing with it. Maddin’s disinclination to spell things out or explain events in his films is perfectly placed here, and renders this take evergreen.

As Maddin himself put it when I offered the “fiddling while Rome burns” analogy, “I like to think the world leaders are always doing that. So, it may be that this film is of the moment. But I think it will always be of the moment – unless maybe World War III renders everything to oblivion. Until that happens, I think it will always be of the moment.”

If Rumours is Maddin’s moment, it’s a suitably awkward one. He inhabits a middle ground between the Art Film Planet and Planet Oscar. Though he’s never been invited to the Big Show, two of the actresses in Rumours – Blanchett and Alicia Vikander (who plays a traumatized diplomatic aide) – have won Academy Awards.

If it puts him one degree of separation from the Big Time, he has a realistic handle on his place in the film world. Of casting Blanchett, he says, “I mean, she knew of me, which isn’t something I can presume. But I’m well-known in some nooks and crannies of the film world, and totally unknown in other great vast spaces.”

Rumours is now streaming on Prime Video and on VOD.

The winner for Rogers Best Canadian Film will be announced on Feb. 24.