This acclaimed Canadian filmmaker landed Cate Blanchett for his new absurdist satire. Here’s what she brought to the role

“I like to pretend that I’m not making comedies,” says Guy Maddin. “I’ve always been far too cowardly to extend my begging hands to an audience and ask it to fill them up with laughter.”
Such eloquent self-deprecation is, of course, this particular filmmaker’s specialty. Speaking via Zoom from his home base in Winnipeg, alongside his co-directors Galen and Evan Johnson, Maddin allowed for the possibility that their new movie “Rumours” — which had its Canadian premiere Monday at the Toronto International Film Festival — is genuinely funny stuff. “I was shocked and pleased at how much laughter there was at the premiere at Cannes,” he recalled. “There was tittering.”
“The danger,” said Evan, sitting on his former film-school teacher’s left, “is that laughs can supersede meaning and thoughtfulness and themes and everything else. I don’t think that we thought too much about laughs.”
On some level, “Rumours” is a movie about the profound difficulty of saying what you mean. Sequestered together somewhere in the wilds of Germany, an eccentric septet of liberal-democratic world leaders exchange pleasantries before getting down to brass tacks: their mission is to craft a coherent, actionable group statement in response to an unfolding global crisis. The spirit is willing, but the rhetoric is weak. Their ostensible brainstorming session is more like a light drizzle. And then things start to get seriously weird.
That the narrative swiftly takes leave of reality will be no surprise to Maddin’s fans. His last fictional feature with the Johnsons was 2014’s Toronto Film Critics Association Award-winning “The Forbidden Room,” a delirious, strenuously nonsensical anthology that dazzlingly replicated the textures of early 20th-century silent cinema. Now Maddin and his collaborators move into the present tense — and away from intricate formal pastiche and toward a form of glossy-yet-scabrous political satire.
“This movie was contemporary, so we didn’t need to dig into Guy’s bag of silent movie tricks,” said Galen. “A lot of our weird little things are usually a result of not having a lot of money. (Guy’s) style is actually a collection of limitations.”
“It may not seem like it,” said Maddin, “but I’ve always wanted to evolve.” He gestured toward his co-directors. “Since I strapped myself to the backs of these brojos here, I’ve seen the chance for evolution. It’s not involuntary or against my will or anything.”
In terms of scope and budget, “Rumours” represents the biggest production of its makers’ careers. The film was shot just outside of Budapest, a decision that they say was more about practicality than anything else.
“The forests in Manitoba are pretty scrubby,” said Maddin.
“The castles (in Manitoba) are pretty scrubby, too,” cracked Galen.
The clearest sign that the creative team is levelling up is the presence of Cate Blanchett, whose performance as the shrewd and unflappable German chancellor Hilda Ortmann is a power-suited tour de force.
“She’s the sharpest human I’ve ever encountered,” said Evan of the Oscar-winning star.
“You can’t fool her,” added Maddin. “You can’t tell her it was a great take when she doesn’t think that it was. She’ll go back to the monitor, say it was s—t and demand another one.”
One measure of Blanchett’s excellence is that she gives her co-stars a chance to shine — most notably Maddin’s frequent collaborator Roy Dupuis, who plays the Canadian PM as a smouldering, emotionally dysfunctional prima donna with a seriously tragic coif.
“We didn’t expect Roy to show up with a man bun,” said Galen, who noted that the Quebecois star was a bit confused when he arrived at the overseas shoot. “When (Roy) got to Budapest, he asked, ‘What the f—k are we doing?’”
It’s a fair question and, to its credit, “Rumours” puts the onus of interpretation on the viewer. Is its broadly sketched portrait of ideological confusion and bureaucratic impasse intended as tragedy, farce or something in between?
Crucially, for all its ribbing of the international ruling class, it’s not a mean-spirited movie. Just because the filmmakers don’t seem to particularly respect their characters (or their problem-solving abilities) doesn’t mean that they hate them.
“If you’re angry,” said Galen, “you’ve already lost.”
“We immediately identified with them as morons who are trying to write something that will fix the world’s problems,” said Evan. “They’re going to try, but they’re not going to get there. It was easy for us to identify with that.”