Movie Review
‘Universal Language’ Is the Perfect Blend of Poetry, Parody and Sexy Turkeys
Both a valentine to Iranian cinema and an absurdist look at Winnipeg, Canadian filmmaker Matthew Rankin's comedy is indescribable — so "lo-fi masterpiece" will have to do
It’s a sight familiar to anyone who’s been nurtured on a steady diet of international films: Children are sitting in a classroom, getting lectured by an irate teacher. The conversations are in Farsi, which suggests we’re somewhere on the outskirts of Tehran. The fact that one of the students is dressed as Groucho Marx signals we’re not in Kansas anymore. Eventually, the camera leaves the school grounds and begins to follow two sisters; they’re played by nonprofessional actors Rojina Esmaeili and Saba Vahedyousefi, and exhibit the exact combination of precociousness and lack of self-awareness that usually characterize these types of screen moppets. The siblings come across a dollar bill of unfamiliar denomination frozen in a patch of ice. A grown-up has also noticed the currency. Go get an axe from a shopkeeper, he tells them. I’ll make sure no one else gets to it first.
You don’t believe his intentions are pure. Neither, for that matter, do the girls. But they head off, past florists and tea houses and a store that specializes in selling the finest, most gorgeous turkeys in all the land. Their quest will lead them all over the city, and by the time their journey ends, they will have sampled both kindness and brutal dishonesty. The life lessons don’t rob them of their innocence, but it does give them a glimpse into an adult world that suggests things are never quite what they seem to be.
Now, what if we told you — despite all the talk in a foreign tongue and the Iranian performers and the storefront signs written in Farsi and the cinematic vocabulary clearly coded as something akin to Abbas Kiarostami-lite — that this while thing takes place in the snowy, super-banal Canadian suburbs of Winnipeg?
This is the incongruity that fuels Universal Language, Matthew Rankin’s glorious parody-slash-ode to someone else’s shadows-on-a-wall missives — a gesture of decontextualization that layers one country’s extraordinary visual poetry over another’s extreme blandness. Should you be blessed with knowing the filmmaker’s previous work, notably shorts like 2014’s Mynarski Death Plummet and 2017’s The Tesla World Light (you can find both online) and his 2019 feature debut The Twentieth Century, you might be fooled in to thinking that this is all just niche film-nerd trolling. Rankin’s formative movies usually milked a faux-biopic format and played like delirious, black-and-white fever dreams, smothered with generous amounts of Absurdism pushed past its limits and self-deprecating Canadian in-jokes. Call his surreal style “Mountie Python,” or simply imagine fellow Manitoba native Guy Maddin huffing higher-grade glue. You get the idea.
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And trust us when we tell you that, from the moment a replica of the Kanoon institute’s vintage logo — redubbed as the Winnipeg Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young People and with a turkey subbed in for their signature songbird — opens the film, the sheer commitment to the bit is impressive enough on its own. You do not need to be familiar with Kiarostami’s kid-centric movies like The Traveler (1974) and Homework (1989), or similarly themed Iranian movies like The White Balloon (1995) or The Apple (1998) to get what Rankin’s riffing off of, though it certainly enhances the experience. There are other storylines besides the sisters’ crusade to liberate that currency from its frozen prison as well. We occasionally ride shotgun with a tour guide (played by co-writer Pirouz Nemati) showing folks where the Great Parallel Parking Incident of 1958 once happened. Ditto a downtrodden everyman who’s left his white-collar job in Quebec to reluctantly return to Winnipeg. The fact that this depressed gent is portrayed by Rankin himself speaks volumes.
We have not even mentioned the turkeys yet, notably the gobbling winner of a sexy-turkey-beauty-contest who’s traveling by bus (that vehicle is driven by Rankin’s other cowriter, Ila Firouzabadi) and set to be picked up by a store owner who sells nothing but turkeys and sings poems to his poultry every night. It’s these type of oddball flourishes, presented with the straightest of faces, that turn Universal Language into something besides random vignettes corralled together into one free-form goof. The lullaby that the man sings to his birds is undeniably silly. It’s also surprisingly moving. So, for that matter, is the recognizable Tim Horton’s Donut Shop sign written out in Farsi — a visual joke that doubles as the apotheosis of Rankin’s cross-cultural exchange program. It’s a chain-store sign that, having been translated into another dialect, elevates the mundane to something mysterious and lyrical. We bet their version of a Double Double is twice as strong, too.
That, in essence, is what Universal Language wants to be: a hilarious yet heartfelt love letter written in duplicate, that borrows another culture’s calligraphy to adequately express affection for one’s own. It takes a second to realize that while Rankin’s film technically falls under the category of parody, there’s nothing mean-spirited about its digs at Winnipeg’s shopping malls, historical landmarks and wintry dourness. The filmmaker’s fondness for Iranian cinema isn’t a hipster pose or a pretentious front — it’s 100-percent genuine, as pure as fresh snowfall on Chief Peguis Trail. Even the meta aspects he borrows from that nation’s filmmakers in terms of breaking the fourth wall are completely in line with his cockeyed tribute. There is no universal language except the lingua franca of seeing yourself reflected back in cinema made half a world away, and then responding in kind. And there is no single category that you can slot Rankin’s mix of a wink, a nudge and an embrace into, so we guess “lo-fi masterpiece” will have to do until a better option comes along.