I feel a kind of kinship with the filmmakers of the Winnipeg Film Group, that motley crew perhaps most famously represented by Guy Maddin, who have charted their own stylized, eccentric path through Canadian cinema. Singularly offbeat, gloriously psychedelic, uproariously irreverent, and seemingly immune to convention, their work has brought me immense joy throughout my years of cinematic obsession, along with a certain amount of pride as a fellow Canadian.
In recent years, the work of group member Matthew Rankin has only deepened my appreciation for that tradition. Beginning as a director of gorgeously surreal, often bleakly satirical short collage films, Rankin’s feature career took off in spectacular fashion with his anachronistically expressionist portrait of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, The Twentieth Century, before he doubled down on his gift for surrealism with Universal Language (which I reviewed at TIFF for The Lonely Film Critic a few years ago). There was never any question that his newest feature, Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney, would be high on my list of must-sees at this year’s TIFF, and I’m delighted to report that he has delivered once again.
Suave, urbane, impeccably dressed, and always ready to charm a crowd with a well-worn punchline, Brian Mulroney may have been Canada’s first truly media-ready prime minister. As a Xennial who has lived with one foot in both the analogue and digital realms, and who grew up with formative memories of seeing Mulroney on television, Rankin’s fascination with him as a subject feels particularly apt. But while Mulroney’s family might understandably have preferred a straightforward, strait-laced piece of hagiography about “The Boy from Baie-Comeau,” Rankin’s film is anything but. Working from thousands of hours of archival footage, combed over and picked clean to the grain, he fashions something akin to the most gleefully insane retro-pop fever dream Canadian cinema has ever witnessed.
Told in six distinct “episodes,” Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney begins at the 1976 Progressive Conservative leadership convention, where Mulroney made his first bid to become party leader—and failed. A mere ten minutes into the proceedings, we get our first taste of Rankin’s particular brand of Winnipegian impishness. To the gossamer strains of “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” a curtain rises on the stage as a gleaming white futuristic convertible emblazoned with “MULRONEY” on its hood drives into view. An animated figure with Mulroney’s superimposed head slowly floats out of the vehicle and begins his convention speech, decked out in a gaudy, shimmering blue cape that would have made Liberace green with envy.
Through deft edits to bemused reaction shots from the audience—including former Prime Minister John “Dief the Chief” Diefenbaker, whom we eventually learn disliked Mulroney for his involvement in what Diefenbaker regarded as an attempt to oust him as party leader a decade earlier—Rankin constructs a sequence that is so brazenly ludicrous, so audaciously facetious, and yet so acutely perceptive of Mulroney’s privileged persona that the satire’s effectiveness is almost instantaneous. Laughter spills forth at the ridiculous spectacle before us, but through that laughter we also register the brilliance of Rankin’s approach. The joke is distilled with such precision, and with such a perfect balance of savagery and showmanship, that it simultaneously brings Mulroney back down to earth and leaves us wondering how on earth he managed the political comeback we already know was coming.
And this is the central thrust of Rankin’s film: a comeback story in which stone-cold facts freely intermingle with invented absurdities that nevertheless contain their own truths about the rifts and ruptures bubbling beneath Canada’s political sphere in the late 1970s and early ’80s. In charting Mulroney’s rise through his particular brand of offbeat exuberance, Rankin also finds room to examine the enduring divide between English and French Canada, the seemingly perpetual difficulty Conservatives have faced in finding favour with Quebec, and the gradual erosion of the genuinely progressive conservatism of Mulroney’s era into the more reactionary populism of today.
There is also much to be said about how the film is as much about Joe Clark as it is about Mulroney. Clark, who defeated Mulroney for the Conservative leadership in 1976 and whose tenure as Canada’s 16th prime minister was brief and is now largely forgotten, was nevertheless instrumental to Mulroney’s ascent precisely because he was everything Mulroney was not: awkward in public, homelier in appearance, halting in French, and lacking his rival’s tactical shrewdness. Rankin stages the dichotomy between Clark and Mulroney with an almost Shakespearean theatricality, illuminating the more unsavoury dimensions of Mulroney’s cutthroat pragmatism through the prism of Clark’s downfall. Ironically, this may well be the most definitive portrait of Joe Clark’s career we ever see on screen. Perhaps it is fitting that it should be nestled, matryoshka-like, inside this gonzo treatment of the very man who quietly played the long game to succeed him.
I could go on and on about how rich and inventive Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney is, and this is becoming something of a recurring theme for me when it comes to Matthew Rankin’s work. His creative process feels like a jolt of adrenaline not only to Canadian cinema but to the cinematic realm at large. It may sound odd to say so, especially since viewers outside Canada will be unable to fully appreciate the sheer lengths to which Rankin goes here, or all the Easter eggs he scatters along the way. But even with some context inevitably lost, the totality of his effort to remould the historical archive with such temerity and gusto is impossible to ignore. He is not merely rewriting the old rulebooks; he is reinvigorating them with a newfound sense of wonder, generosity, and stylistic audacity.
Politicians like Joe Clark may not have withstood the test of time, but I’m willing to bet that Matthew Rankin’s legacy is already on track to be immense indeed.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney had its world premiere at TIFF in the Midnight Madness programme on Tuesday, September 15, 2026.
The Lonely Film Critic 