Rumours, a cautionary dramedy cum erotico-ministerial techno-thriller and provisional Götterdämmerung written and directed by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, has been accepted, with only minimal reservations, misgivings, caveats, and scruples, by the Official Selection committee of the Cannes Film Festival, a regional cinema conference and entertainment expo held every single year, almost without exception, in the south of France.
The famous festival, named for the humble, salt-of-the-earth fishing village in which its screenings are held and which, in 154 BC, was the site of a brief but violent conflict between the troops of Quintus
Optimus and the Oxbii, is known for its sandy beaches and the noonday torpor of its local vendors.
Rumours’ Canuck helmers had this to say: “Compelled by the looming doomsdays with which we are become too familiar, seduced by the eschatological sinuosities inscribed provocatively across our sulphur-clotted skies, with nothing but hopelessness to console ourselves, and with our chill-blasted souls much in need of the warmth sometimes only nostalgia can provide, we directors have turned our despairing attentions, rosary beads chattering like teeth in our skeletal fingers, to the quaint old customs of diplomacy — namely the G7!”
Along with the above-quoted cri de coeur, the three co-helmers have released a photographic still image from their film, an image that it would hardly be an exaggeration to call “a moral triumph”, nor would anyone be mocked or criticized for saying so.
Addendum from Executive Producer Ari Aster: “The fact that Guy Maddin, the most idiosyncratic and original Canadian filmmaker of the ’20s and ’30s, found Evan and Galen Johnson, the most idiosyncratic and original Canadian filmmakers of the moment, is miraculous. The fact that they have departed so freely from their brilliant work of the last decade, while still retaining their prodigious gift for hyperbolic wordplay and their endless comic and aesthetic invention, is more miraculous yet. RUMOURS is stoopid and hilarious and wonderful, and it features the best cast ever assembled. The spirit of Buñuel and Monty Python and overwrought ’70s television (and of course the Maddin/Johnson sensibility, which has no real analogue) is alive and strange.”
Directed by: Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson
Written by: Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson
Starring: Cate Blanchett, Alicia Vikander, Roy Dupuis, Charles Dance, Denis Ménochet, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Rolando Ravello, Takehiro Hira, Zlatko Burić
Produced by: Liz Jarvis, Philipp Kreuzer, Lars Knudsen
Executive Produced by: Andrew Karpen, Kent Sanderson, Ari Aster, Jörg Schulze, Phyllis Laing, Blair Ward, Anders Erden, Lauren Case, Eric Harbert, Gillian Hormel, Mary Aloe, Stefan Kapelari, Gábor Sipos, Gábor Rajna
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