Universal Language: A Farsi-cal What-If Fever Dream of Winnipeg and this Country
By Liam Lacey
Rating: A
If you are thinking of buying Canadian this week, I suggest getting a ticket to Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language. Upon revisiting the film after seeing it last November, it struck me as more Canadian than I had first thought, a film about hybrid identities, an inhospitable climate, the poetry of the banal, and also wonderfully silly.
As well as being picked as Canada’s submission for Best International Picture at the Oscars, the film was celebrated at Cannes last May, winning the debut audience award at the Directors Fortnight in Cannes, with Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri declaring it the best film of the festival.
On first look, Universal Language seemed like an accomplished bit of conceptual whimsy, a playfully melancholic pastiche of Iranian cinema set in the depths of a Winnipeg winter. The 16mm cinematography by Isabelle Stachtchenko, features conspicuously composed long shots while the underpopulated world inside the frame looks formal and bleak.
The performances, by mostly non-professional actors, are low-key and unemotional. In general, the tone conforms to the weird Winnipeg cinema aesthetic, led by prairie surrealists Guy Maddin and John Paizs, known for making artisanal, personal films that play with vintage cinema tropes.
Rankin, who studied Canadian history in university, has made a series of shorts and one previous feature film, 2019’s The Twentieth Century. Using Super-8 and 16-mm film, tinting, animation, puppets, cross-dressing performances and theatrical sets, he created a wildly creative, off-beat tribute to a famously charisma-free politician, William Lyon MacKenzie King.
Universal Language is comparatively, toned down, a film that pays tribute to the new wave of Iranian cinema of the 1980s and 1990s, co-written by Rankin and Pirouz Nemati and Ila Firouzabadi. The film’s models are the poetic realist dramas about children such as Abbas Kiarostami’s Where is The Friend’s House, Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon, as well as the imposter film, Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s A Moment of Innocence.
The Winnipeg/Tehran mashup is not explained, but simply presented as an alternative reality. Buildings throughout have signs in Persian script and characters speak either Farsi or French. An open-air market in the dead of a Winnipeg winter sells roasted beets and old typewriters. A Tim Horton’s outlet sells tea from samovars and Persian pastries. The score by Amir Amiri and Christophe Lamarche-Ledoux, which interweaves traditional Persian music and electro-ambient music.
Rankin refuses to make binary choices for a few characters, men in women’s clothes, women dressed in men’s. What goes in the rest of the country outside of Montreal - which is seen briefly at the film’s beginning – and Winnipeg, is vague, though a character comments, on a long bus ride, that Ontario is “very romantic in the moonlight.”
In short, Universal Language is something of bag of mixed nuts, a Frankenfilm, a cinematic turducken, with comic non-sequiturs and sight gags linked by three narrative strands. One strand is a pseudo-autobiographical story with the director, Matthew Rankin, playing a character called Matthew Rankin who ditches his civil service job in Quebec to return to Winnipeg to see his ailing mother.
Another story involves a tour guide, Massoud (Pirouz Nemati) taking a fractious tour group through Winnipeg districts known as Grey, Beige and Brown, depending on the dominant building colour. The group visits historic sites including a parkade, a park bench with a forgotten brief case on it and a mall fountain that has been turned off because it attracted loiterers.
If this weren’t entertaining enough, Massoud invites the group to take 30 minutes of silence in the freezing cold to honour the memory of Louis Riel, the founder of Manitoba (though hanged as a traitor), whose image is on the currency.
A third strand follows two elementary school girls Negin (Rojina Esmaeili) and Nazgol (Saba Vahedyousefi) who find a 500 Riel note frozen in the ice. (Riel’s name echoes the Iranian unit of currency, the rial.)
The girls want to unfreeze the money to buy new glasses for a classmate, Omid (Sobhan Javadi), who says his glasses were stolen by a turkey. All the story strands involve a beauty contest-winning turkey, and all the stories eventually converge with a kind of dream logic of merging identities.
On a repeat viewing, especially in the wake of the American election, I’m conscious that Rankin, the one-time history student, has also made a film that is political. The Universal Language of the title might refer to the presumption of good will, a repudiation of xenophobia, a celebration of hospitality, co-operation and the creative cooperation.
Think of it as a quirkily idealized vision of Canada, a country where one in five us were born abroad, where people with complex hybrid identities share interdependent stories. Like Universal Language, we’re kind of a political turducken, which I would really prefer not to be swallowed like a greasy Big Mac with a side of French fries.
Universal Language. Directed by Matthew Rankin. Written by Matthew Rankin, Pirouz Nemati and Ila Firouzabadi. Starring: Rojina Esmaeili, Saba Vahedyousefi, Sobhan Javadi, Pirouz Nemati, Matthew Rankin, Mani Soleymanlou, Danielle Fichaud, Bahram Nabatian, Ila Firouzabadi, Hemela Pourafzal and Dara Najmabadi.
Universal Language opens on February 7 (Toronto, Ottawa, Edmonton, Québec City); Feb 10: (Victoria Film Festival); February 14 (St. Catharines, Halifax, Victoria;February 21 - Charlottetown, Hamilton, Waterloo)