The follow-up to his anarchic debut feature The Twentieth Century, a postmodern restaging of Canadian history that eschewed accuracy and realism in favor of strange psycho-sexual fetishes and aesthetic fixations, Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language takes a similarly irreverent approach to depicting his country’s geography and socio-political environment.
The film initially centers on what appears to be an Iranian middle school, albeit one situated in an incongruously wintry landscape, where an irate teacher (Mani Soleymanlou), ranting at his misbehaving pupils, asks them, “Can’t you at least fool around in French?!” We soon follow two young girls (Saba Vahedyousefi and Rojina Esmaelli) who set out to retrieve a banknote stuck inside a frozen puddle, as Rankin’s sophomore effort gradually reveals itself to be set in a parallel-universe Canada that recalls 1980s Iran as envisioned by one of the auteurs of the Iranian New Wave. Meanwhile, a character named Matthew Rankin (played by the director himself) leaves his adopted home of Montreal to visit his ailing mother in his native Winnipeg.
Keen-eyed viewers will spot the opening dedication to Winnipeg’s fictional Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, a reference to the real-life Iranian body of the same name, making Rankin’s influences here all but explicit. Otherwise known as Kanun, this organization was a breeding ground for the nation’s most cutting-edge cultural work in the late ’60s and ’70s and paved the way for Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s House?
Universal Language is particularly indebted to Kiarostami’s 1987 feature, the first installment of his famous Koker trilogy, with washing lines, cramped alleyways, and free-roaming farmyard animals all forming part of its vibrant yet minimalist tableaus, which effectively convey the perspective of its child protagonists as they pursue their digressive quest. Paralleling the film’s absurdist sense of humor, inventive blocking, precise slow pans and the use of exaggerated scale also recall the quasi-cartoonish visual style of Jacques Tati or Aki Kaurismäki.
None of this reference-spotting is to suggest that Rankin’s slice of cinephilic Canadiana is excessively arch or academic, as his film exudes the humanist outlook of the aforementioned cinematic touchstones. Particularly as his own character’s journey progresses and he reconnects with Dara (Dara Najmabadi), a Winnipeg native currently living in his childhood home, an underlying sense of warmth and compassion rises closer to the surface. It’s most clearly on display in a surprisingly tender, lyrical scene where he visits Dara and his family, their domestic bliss emphasized through the elegiac soundtrack and standing in stark contrast to the contrived scenarios and barren, austere backdrops depicted in the film up to that point.
How Universal Language’s Canada came to be so dominated by Iran’s people, architecture, language, and culture isn’t a question that the film feels the need to address. That the country’s sparse landscapes and interiors are fleshed out only enough to keep Rankin’s audacious premise grounded engenders a defamiliarization that never fully subsides, as opposed to nudging the idea in the direction of speculative fiction. Such whimsical details as a cowboy-hatted turkey merchant or a lavish all-hours bingo hall are also of a piece with this matter-of-fact dream logic, which mostly prevents them from becoming too grating or ostentatious.
Of course, it’s possible to see the film’s offbeat tone as following naturally from the inherently alienated status of the director’s homeland. Whether it’s a government official grumbling about his decision to leave Quebec while an unseen clerk quietly sobs in a nearby cubicle, a tour guide proudly taking visitors to a series of increasingly underwhelming attractions, or a billboard bearing Justin Trudeau’s face and the slogan “a strong economy limits feelings of worthlessness,” Universal Language shows little mercy in lampooning the sense of irrelevant mediocrity and repressed negative emotions prevalent in Canadian culture. It’s a clear thematic concern of Rankin’s, and his exploration of this national pathology through boldly revisionist, fantastical re-imaginings have earned him more than a few comparisons to his countryman Guy Maddin, presumably doing nothing to alleviate his inherited inferiority complex.
Though juxtaposing Canada’s drabness and relative lack of heritage with Iran’s millennia of unbroken tradition brings out the former aspects particularly clearly, Universal Language is aiming beyond mere satire or culture-clash playfulness. Throughout the film, Rankin succeeds in finding an effective tonal balance between deadpan irony and heartfelt sincerity, allowing for something like a sign for a Tim Hortons restaurant written in Farsi to be not only a solid sight gag and a gentle provocation, but also an illustration of how people are shaped by the social practices, visual symbols, and built environment that surround them.
For all its self-conscious quirk, the film’s oneiric realm does enable a searching psychological analysis of the desire to assimilate and find a sense of belonging. In its obscurity and unresolved ambiguities, it seems to question whether it’s desirable, or even possible, simply to adopt a different way of life as one’s own. The unexpectedly Lynchian narrative shift at the conclusion of Universal Language suggests that its odd alternate reality might be at once an expression of a firmly held wish and a profoundly tragic gesture of resignation.
Cast: Rojina Esmaeili, Saba Vahedyousefi, Sobham Javadi, Mani Soleymanlou, Matthew Rankin, Pirouz Nemati, Dara Najmabadi Director: Matthew Rankin Screenwriter: Matthew Rankin, Pirouz Nemati, Ila Firouzabadi Distributor: Oscilloscope Running Time: 96 min Rating: NR Year: 2024