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| Québec premier François Legault |
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| Director Matthew Rankin |
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| Matthew Rankin as Groucho Marx in 1988 |
UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE (Une Langue Universelle) B Canada (89 mi) 2024 d: Matthew Rankin
We were looking for ourselves in each other. —a line from Sergei Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates (1969) that was crucial for this film’s creation according to the press notes, where Matthew Rankin also hilariously interviews himself, A Film by Matthew Rankin PRESSKIT
Among the more original films you can see, described by the director as a “surrealist comedy” and an “autobiographical hallucination,” raising questions of identity, displacement, and cultural intersections, where anyone who can appreciate the absurdity of Guy Maddin’s MY WINNIPEG (2007) can appreciate the hilarious irreverence of this film. Existing in a netherworld between Winnipeg, Tehran, and the social realist aesthetic of Iranian films, yet also Montreal after the 1995 Quebec referendum, when the French-speaking province attempted to break away from the rest of Canada, but lost, refusing to let it go, still immersed in a hotbed of Québécois nationalism, exacerbating a continual dispute between Anglo and Francophone culture, so it’s hard to tell just exactly where we are at any given moment, as this appears to be more of a state of mind film, a somewhat demented adaptation of the director’s own life, where he plays the central character Matthew, a rather passive, melancholic, absurdly Kafkaesque Josef K figure who leaves the cultural comforts of Montreal for the wintry wasteland that is Winnipeg. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that the entire film is filtered through the Iranian Farsi language, supposedly “in the name of friendship,” as an early title card reads, inspired by Iranian films of the 1970’s, which were largely humanistic children’s fables, with an opening dedication to a fictional Winnipeg Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, otherwise known as Kanoon (Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children & ...), a real-life Iranian entity associated with the early works of Abbas Kiarostami, an open tribute to the first installment of his famous Koker trilogy, WHERE IS THE FRIEND’S HOUSE (1987), with its blending of fiction with reality/documentary, exactly as Rankin did in an early short from 2008, Self-Portrait M.Rankin YouTube (2:56), yet somehow it’s all transferred into Canada of the present, reimagined where Persian and French are the two official languages, and English is non-existent. Something of a mishmash of recurring vignettes and set pieces, with the director acknowledging “Iranian cinema emerges from 1000 years of poetry, while Canadian cinema emerges from 40 years of discounted furniture ads,” the film is full of sight gags, deadpan Tatiesque humor, weirdly eccentric characters, like a man dressed as a Christmas tree, and plenty of wild turkeys! Premiering in Director’s Fortnight at Cannes where it won the first ever Audience Choice Award, this breezy, light-hearted film is easy to like, shot in a beautifully grainy 16mm look from Isabelle Stachtchenko, using almost entirely non-professionals, while shot on a shoestring budget, where despite the whimsical spirit, there’s a deep sense of loneliness embedded beneath the surface. The director was present during the screening, and he’s extremely witty in person, filled with hilarious rants and caustic observations, where he’s especially critical of the Québec film industry, believing they make dreadfully anguishing existential films that plunge us into the depths of despair and simply exist in their own soulless purgatory. This parallel universe appears to be an uplifting remedy, supposedly drawn from the director’s own “meaningless” life, with no real main character, but several stories told in parallel, taking us into a world of omnipresent snow with a Stalinist landscape of colorless brick and concrete buildings (the director’s favorite) or highway overpasses with trucks rolling by and endless traffic noise, where somewhere in this labyrinthean maze of dead ends exists the human soul.
Taking a page out of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses (Kuru Otlar Üstüne) (2023), the film opens under a blanket of snow with a French immersion teacher Mr. Bilodeau (Mani Soleymanlou) arriving late before berating his primary school classroom for numerous offenses, such as the noisy outbursts they were making before he arrived, “Please, would you at least have the decency to misbehave in French?,” yet when he asks what their future careers will look like in a Woody Allen Annie Hall (1977) moment, where we discover a student dressed like Groucho Marx (the director reports he did this as a child), or a budding donkey breeder, he concludes that “all of you will fail,” offering little hope for human survival before having them read a sentence on the blackboard, “We are lost forever in this world.” That is our introductory moment into this film, where the name of the Robert H. Smith school is written in Persian lettering, a theme that continues for the duration of the film, with all the men referred to as “agha,” a Farsi term of endearment, like addressing someone as sir. On their way home from school, two young female grade school students, Negin (Rojina Esmaeili) and her sister Nazgol (Saba Vahedyousefi), happen upon a 500 riel bill (a play on Iranian rial currency) frozen under the ice, asking a nearby man in purple earmuffs, Massoud (Pirouz Nemati), if he can help, but he steers them to a friend in a nearby turkey store to borrow an axe to chip away the ice, steadfastly deferring their requests that he go borrow the axe, since it’s his friend, but the man insists that he stay, sending them on a wild goose chase through Winnipeg’s shopping neighborhoods, named appropriately beige, brown, and grey districts, each looking eerily the same, the washed out colors blending indistinctly into the other, where it’s hard to tell the difference. The kids are turned away at every turn, with no one offering a hint of interest, leaving them to navigate this maze of corridors and barren alleyways that all seem to lead to nowhere. By the time they actually have success, it has grown dark outside and the riel note has already been chipped out of the ice, where the kids are thwarted in their quest, with a deceiving Massoud the likely suspect in outwitting these kids. A continuously surprising meditation on being away from home and then being unable to find one’s way back, as nothing is remotely the same, having been transformed in our absence, this outrageously eccentric satire hits buttons we’ve never even imagined until brought to light in this outlandish manner. The origin of this film may be the director’s early fascination with foreign films, as they spoke to him in a way that few English-language films ever had, and even traveled to Iran at one point, where the beauty of the experience was seeing the world differently, where we recognize ourselves in each other, sharing common interests, becoming a wacky, off-kilter exploration of cultural identity, where there’s even an appearance of a memorable song from the 60’s, These eyes - The Guess Who (1969) YouTube (3:58), but the object of affection here is a prized turkey! Placing an emphasis on human connections and intercultural coexistence, a recurring motif is misdirection and random miscommunication, as characters continually seek ways to connect to each other, becoming part of a larger human collective, but when they lose that interconnectedness and sense of community, they can become lost and disoriented in a baffling mix of muddled confusion. In a strange twist of fate, Omid (Sobhan Javadi), the son of Massoud loses his glasses, but when one of the girls retrieves them and he puts them back on near the end, the roles of Matthew and Massoud mysteriously switch, signaling how easily we misinterpret the world around us because we lack the correct perspective.
In a parallel story of alienation and a longing for identity, we see Matthew playing a version of himself as he resigns his menial civil servant position in the Québec government to move back home to Winnipeg to visit his ailing mother. Taking place in a giant room under a large portrait of Québec premier François Legault, a lone table sits off to the side in the corner where a government official steers Matthew away from making any criticisms of the Québec government, indicating he may make positive or neutral remarks, but nothing negative, causing him to utter with the utmost sincerity, “My time here was by far the most neutral experience of my life.” Ironically, in a nearby cubicle, a man can be heard and occasionally seen sobbing profusely, obviously a sign of extreme unhappiness, yet the cause remains a mystery. On the bus to Manitoba a woman passenger complains bitterly that a prized live turkey is given its own seat next to her, yet the driver informs her that this special bird has won avian beauty contests and is a paying customer. Throughout this film various people contend they clearly supported Quebec’s right to independence in the referendum vote, where it’s likely more people say that after the vote, as if in hindsight that’s politically correct, at least in Québec, though it’s hardly an indicator of how they actually voted. Once back in Winnipeg, Matthew is forced to idle his afternoon time away at a Tim Horton’s (Always Fresh! transformed into an Arabic teahouse with donuts) while awaiting a designated appointment with someone after work, as he’s blindsided by the discovery that his mother has moved to a different address and is now living with a total stranger that she mistakenly believes is him, no longer recognizing him anymore. In a bemused portrait of an alternative universe, we see a series of strange and mysterious happenings, among which include a barrage of cheesy television ads from Hafez Ghamghosar (Bahram Nabatian), a singing turkey expert in a pink cowboy hat, claiming he has the best turkeys anywhere, anytime, with a look that’s right out of the VHS era of the 1970’s, a surreal glimpse into a Kleenex repository, a lavish all-hours bingo parlor, a shop that sells only birthday cakes, or a billboard bearing Justin Trudeau’s face and the slogan “a strong economy helps to prevent feelings of worthlessness.” Yet we also follow the baffling exploits of Massoud in the purple earmuffs as a self-appointed Winnipeg tour guide, where he leads a small following who gripe their way through an endless cold and windswept journey to some of the most unglamorous and drably uninteresting sites imaginable, like tall windowless buildings, parking lots, and abandoned shopping centers, where they discover “the Great Parallel Parking Incident of 1958,” a memorial to Métis leader Louis Riel, founder of the province of Manitoba (executed by the government for his role in the North-West Rebellion), which is basically a snow pile located between a freeway and an exit ramp, a deserted shopping mall fountain with no running water, meaning “All wishes are canceled,” suggesting residents are hoping for the water to someday return, or a “Forgotten Briefcase” left behind decades ago on a bus stop bench that no one has touched, thinking the owner may still come to retrieve it, becoming a UNESCO World Heritage site and “a monument to absolute inter-human solidarity, even at its most basic and banal,” where a sense of Canadian mediocrity exists around every corner. Written by Ila Firouzabadi (who plays a bus driver), Pirouz Nemati, and Matthew Rankin, nothing ordinary happens here, as it’s all simply imagined from the deranged mind of Rankin who clearly has a thing for movies, as this will take you on an amusement park roller coaster ride the likes of which you’ve never seen. And in case you didn’t know it before, laughter is a universal language.
