Universal Language opens on a stationary wide shot of a French language school in Winnipeg. In the snow. The teacher comes storming in, late and angry; once there, he takes it out on his young Persian students, telling them flatly that they’ll never amount to anything. This moment specifically evokes Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s House?, but also recalls the more recent About Dry Grasses, another snowy film wherein teacher Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu) shouts at his students that they will only ever be sheep farmers. What this beginning does is set up the film’s playful tone: Rather than traumatized by the ranting teacher, the children are puzzled and maybe even worried for their oddball instructor’s sanity and it also cheekily introduces several strands that will weave through the rest of the movie, one of which involves a glasses-stealing prized turkey.
But Universal Language is really just an amalgamation of Matthew Rankin’s two main interests his hometown of Winnipeg and Iranian cinema except that he has decided to make those two interests as eclectic as possible. If you don’t know your Children of Heaven from your White Balloon: Not to worry! You can still dig this movie’s absurdity if you’re open to its wavelength. And Rankin (who shoots on 16mm with DP Isabelle Stachtchenko) knows how to calibrate tone and frame so that we can easily slip into the surreal world he has constructed a world where everyone in this sleepy Canadian city speaks Farsi (including all business signage), and even Tim Horton’s is a fancy place that serves Persian doughnuts and tea.
One narrative track springs directly from a story Rankin’s grandma told him about growing up during the Depression: She said she and her pals discovered a banknote frozen into some ice, then attempted all sorts of methods to extract it. This got Matthew thinking about those ‘70s Iranian movies he loved, where children are faced with adult-sized conundrums. That thread bumps up against one here in which a character named “Matthew Rankin” (played by the director) returns home after a souless career stint in Quebec; coming back and re-encountering the magic of your hometown is its own genre, but Rankin has once again managed to put his own spin on it here, sidestepping the overly nostalgic pitfalls that often plague such a typically Sundance-y narrative. For example: Matthew, as a character, finds his place at home wholly usurped by an interloper. This person is a local tour guide who leads groups through an offbeat collection of drab Winnipeg sights including this briefcase that was left at a bus stop years ago and has since been designated a UNESCO World Heritage landmark. There’s also this sort of humanist optimism running through the movie; for instance, nobody has ever looked inside said briefcase (it’s believed to hold papers). Even in bad times there remains some fondness for one’s fellow man. Which makes a certain betrayal late in the film involving that frozen bank note hit all the harder for two kids who have become caught up in it.
Universal Language also evokes Wes Anderson’s controlled frames and Roy Andersson’s stilted conversations and well-composed wides; Aki Kaurismäki’s work is another point of reference here too. But it isn’t just an empty rubble of film references for cinephiles in the know it has a real heart, and a lingering sadness at that. This may be where it comes closest to Anderson, who likewise knows how framing, score, even line readings can combine to get people feeling things they can’t quite understand.
Foreign cinema does its best work when it does two things: first, as Rankin says, when it shows how the “there” is “here.” That is what the title refers to that humans are humans everywhere else too, with similar wants and hang-ups etc. But foreign cinema must also show something about how different cultures raise up these humans. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives represents a completely un-American account of the situation in which characters accept a spirit at their dinner table without much fussing over why or how he got there. In Tim Horton’s sign written in Farsi realizes the mash-up as deeply surreal and an image only cinema could come up with this understand so universal language rankin youth traveled to tehran study film there crypticallly calling attempt failure but meeting lots great people returning canada did good failure struck by shared brutalist architecture between winnipeg universal language frequently finds beauty blandness whimsy everyday remarkable second feature from rankin according winter sky this buildings grey beige concrete jutting have real.
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