Review: Diplomacy goes primal in the satiric ‘Rumours,’ set in a political wilderness

If you’re curious what really happens when world leaders assemble to reach consensus about global problems, go read a book about it. But if, given our current geopolitical reality, you imagine a cross between cabin-in-the-woods horror and a high school soap opera, then the deliciously absurd and Buñuelian “Rumours,” co-directed by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, may just seem like a documentary to your anxious mind.

The filmmaking Canadian trio are known for their movie-mad fantasias (“The Forbidden Room,” “The Green Fog”), and “Rumours” plays closer to a sketch idea elongated to star-studded feature length. It’s certainly made for these (end) times: a lushly surreal, cynically ticklish goof on the ineffectiveness of political summits as apocalyptic dread mounts. Somewhere, the aforementioned Spanish director behind “The Exterminating Angel” is nodding wryly at the idea of a satire about G-7 leaders set in a peat bog thick with mummified zombies.

After a Wes Anderson-esque opening of orderly pomp in which our fictionalized septet of epically shallow nation leaders is introduced, the hard work of schmoozy collaboration and managing petty neuroses begins. Hosting the lakeside roundtable dinner is Cate Blanchett’s elegant, cool-headed and manipulative German chancellor Hilda, who sits next to her temperamental opposite, the Canadian PM Maxime (Roy Dupuis, hilarious), a passionately brooding, overly sensitive and scandal-tinged gray fox. Early on, we learn that Maxime engaged in a different type of international relations with the nervously polite British minister Cardosa (Nikki Amuka-Bird), but to her consternation, Maxime has moved on.

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Rounding out this slate of dignitaries are the elderly American president (Charles Dance), who, in a never-explained bit of illogic, sports a British accent; France’s intellectually self-aggrandizing and incapacitated head of state (Denis Menochet), who eventually is carted around in a wheelbarrow; and ever-accommodating leaders from Japan (Takehiro Hida of “Shogun”) and Italy (Rolando Rovello), their screen time correlating roughly to the little-sibling attention these countries get on any given news day.

Everyone’s goal is a provisional statement regarding a never-articulated crisis. But sentimental pride in their “burden of leadership,” nonsensical dithering and a gathering fear that the surroundings hold impending doom to them personally, make even crafting the usual gibberish impossible. And indeed, little really happens in screenwriter Evan Johnson’s mélange of lowbrow humor and high-concept wit beyond the straight-faced delivery of bursts of ridiculous dialogue and weird encounters with the self-pleasuring bog people — and eventually, a glistening, car-sized brain. They also find a disheveled ex-colleague (Alicia Vikander) spouting a message of revolutionary doom, but in a different language they can barely be bothered to recognize.

Then again, all the bickering, dawdling, and reliably self-preserving ignorance toward the catastrophe nipping at their heels is the point. Thanks to the deadpan chops of the cast, the low-grade silliness is funny enough to offset the occasional feeling that a shorter, tighter version built around its biggest laughs might have been more effective. (Yet still, it has more fun with human foibles than the smug howling of “Don’t Look Up.”)

“Rumours” also benefits from Maddin’s cheesy, genre-specific DNA, especially in Stefan Ciupek’s pulsating cinematography, which combines mid-century melodrama with a fog-thick monster matinee. It’s also a reminder that the nuclear-age ’50s were the last great movie era to turn universal terror into merrily schizoid audience fare. Hopefully, “Rumours” can kick off a new age of gonzo, let’s-all-laugh-in-fear-together entertainment.