Rumours: LFF Film Review
There has only been one film that I disliked at this year’s London Film Festival – and that film is Rumours. I do not understand the praise for it at all.
In this black comedy, Hilda Ortmann (Cate Blanchett), the Chancellor of Germany, hosts the latest G7 summit at a lavish estate in Dankerode. She and her fellow world leaders – US President Edison Wolcott (Charles Dance), UK Prime Minister Cardosa Dewindt (Nikki Amuka-Bird), Canadian Prime Minister Maxime Laplace (Roy Dupuis), Italian PM Antonio Lamorte (Rolando Ravello), French President Sylvain Broulez (Denis Minochet) and Japanese PM Tatsuro Iwasaki (Takehiro Hira) – are in the middle of drafting a provisional statement about an unspecified global crisis when an apocalyptic event occurs.
I loved this concept and felt confident about its direction when the leaders gathered around a dinner table outdoors and kept procrastinating instead of working on the statement. Unfortunately, after the apocalyptic event occurred, they spent the rest of the movie aimlessly wandering around a spooky forest. This idea ran out of steam really quickly and felt like a sketch that had been stretched into a feature when it didn’t warrant it.
This idea could have gone in so many different directions and the chosen route was too weird and surreal for my liking. I would have preferred a horror angle, with the creepy bog people terrorising and killing the leaders. Instead, these bog people are just there – it felt like such a wasted opportunity!
The cast members are the saving grace. Blanchett does a fantastic Angela Merkel impression (complete with a Princess Diana wig!) and I found Minochet and Ravello quite funny. Alicia Vikander also bizarrely pops up as Celestine Sproul, the Secretary-General of the European Commission, and spouts words nobody can understand (it’s Swedish) before losing the plot entirely. But they can’t save the fact that their characters are thinly written and the absurd story is barely watchable.
Rumours has its moments but it’s nowhere near as funny as it should have been. What a mess.
Seen at the London Film Festival. In cinemas from Friday 6th December