Universal Language

Directors don't get much more quirky than Canadian Matthew Rankin. In his debut film The Twentieth Century (FFG2020) he taught us an alternative and pleasantly deranged history lesson about his home country and its longest-serving (and masturbation-obsessed) prime minister. It earned him comparisons with his compatriot Guy Maddin, an iconoclast first class who lacks realism. In the press notes for his second feature, the deliciously absurdist Universal Language, Rankin interviews himself deadpan, full of self-mockery. In it, he calls his latest pitch ‘an autobiographical hallucination, a cinematic Venn diagram of Winnipeg, Tehran and Montreal, an ode to the Iranian cinema of Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi, a confluence of rivers ... Or a pizza Hawaii.’ Whatever it may be, Universal Language does indeed resemble the film Kiarostami would have made had he been born in Winnipeg.
Rankin depicts a surreal parallel universe where Farsi is the dominant language in the Canadian city of Winnipeg, where time has stood still in the 1980s. Moreover, it is not the Queen who seems to be the adored monarch, but historical revolutionary leader Louis Riel. At school, Negin is suspended along with her entire class until Omid - whose glasses have been stolen by a turkey - can see the front board. Together with her friend Nazgol, Negin finds a sum of money frozen under the ice, but freeing it is another matter. That charming quest cuts Rankin with two more storylines. City guide Massoud leads a group of increasingly confused tourists around important historical sites. Meanwhile, we also see how a grey-haired civil servant (played by Rankin himself) has had it with his job in Quebec, resigns (not before convincing his employer that his experience at the Ministry was the ‘most neutral experience’ of his life) and travels to Winnipeg to visit his mother.
Rankin portrays it with great flair - Wes Anderson is never far away - and fascinates with a world as bizarre as it is witty, full of old-school commercials, daily bingo nights, tourists asking totally irrelevant questions and tons of references to Iranian cinema. Whether you spot those or not, Universal Language works its way to a surprisingly emotional conclusion. Rankin may call his film a hallucination, his vision of a world where we find ourselves in the other hopefully is not.