The satirical film Rumours arrives just in time for the 2024 U.S. presidential election to excavate the size of women’s brains, perceived male primacy among world leaders, and exactly what language Alicia Vikander’s character speaks when she’s distressed. For the record, it’s Swedish.
The genre-defying film is set at the G7, the annual economic summit of seven leaders from democratic countries. Leaders from Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Italy, the United States, and France toil away at useless economic plans while a giant brain pulsates in the forest and zombies prone to circle-jerking around a bonfire take over the world.
The cast of Rumours Courtesy Bleecker Street
It’s Cate Blanchett’s host of the summit and German chancellor, Hilda, who determines Vikander’s secretary-general of the European Commission, Celestine, is in fact, not speaking “gibberish” as the other world leaders contend when they find her wandering the woods of Bavaria. Written and directed by Guy Maddin and Evan and Galen Johnson, Rumours is guffaw-inducing in its ridiculousness and searing in its depiction of a failure of leaders to lead — even among themselves during a zombie uprising. One of the film’s delights is its satirizing of gender roles, which Blanchett notes is timely. A running joke in the film is that Hilda, Celestine, and the U.K.’s Prime Minister Cardosa (Nikki Amuka-Bird) have all succumbed to the wiles of the man bun–sporting Canadian P.M., Maxime, who is given to wide emotional swings when he drinks.
“I think the G7 sometimes can seem satirical without even doing anything. But what I love about the script that was so beautifully wrought is that it leans into, in a really delicious way, into cultural stereotypes and into tropes about female leaders,” Blanchett says.
“I mean, there's still judgments made about whether they have children or not, whether they’re married or not, about their sexual orientation, how they dress. They’re scrutinized in a way that male leaders aren’t. The [writer-directors] really leaned into that," says the double Oscar-winner who launched a program to benefit women, trans, and nonbinary filmmakers.
The cast of Rumours Courtesy Bleecker Street
When Italian P.M. Antonio (Rolando Ravello), U.S. President Edison (played by quintessentially British actor Charles Dance), and Denis Ménochet’s French President Sylvain happen upon the outsized brain in the woods, Sylvain authoritatively declares it must be a woman’s giant brain because it’s smaller than of a man’s giant brain.
That’s the moment Blanchett says is the “pinnacle” of how Maddin and the Johnson brothers skewered sexism.
“To actually be able to laugh at that when there is such rampant aspirational misogyny in the world at the moment…,” Blanchett says. “I think it's a collective laugh at the stupidity of a lot of the assumptions that are made about female leaders.”
Watch the full interview with Blanchett and Denis Ménochet above. Rumours is in theaters now.
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