The trouble with political summits, splutters the president of France (Denis Ménochet) to the German chancellor (Cate Blanchett) as they troop their way to a photo op, is the constant interference. If only the little folk would leave the statesmen and women alone for a while, who knows what the latter might achieve?
Rumours lets us find out. This triumphantly stupid ensemble comedy, which premiered on Saturday night at Cannes to a five-minute standing ovation, casts the G7 leadership adrift in a B-movie, essentially turning the heads of the leading liberal first-world democracies into the Mystery Machine gang from Scooby-Doo.
During a working lunch in a German castle’s picturesque grounds, a supernatural apocalypse descends. Soon, our prim septet – including Nikki Amuka-Bird as the desperately proper British PM, and Charles Dance as the doddering and narcoleptic US President (who, in an inspired absurdist running-joke, has an intact English accent) – are battling zombie bog-monsters and tangling with a giant glowing brain, while a creepy forest presses in on all sides.
The premise sounds as though it must invite a satirical reading, and there are many well-aimed ironic jabs at aspects of the leaders’ national character and the box-ticking rigmarole of modern politics. But directors Guy Maddin and brothers Evan and Galen Johnson – three beloved cult Canadian experimentalists – also poke fun at the notion that their intentions could be so clean-cut.
“Do you think it might be illuminating to consider this situation as an allegory?” panics France at one point, before musing ominously: “Germany caught up in the dramatics… we’ve seen this before.” In fact, the dramatics are one of the key causes of laughter, as the leaders squabble, flap and flirt among themselves, while trying to maintain an air of serene centrist gravitas.