One of the most charmingly off-beat world premieres screening in Cannes this week, Universal Language is a highly original meta-comic meditation on cultural identity and cinematic folk memory. Conceptually ambitious for such a modestly scaled indie production, writer-director Matthew Rankin’s second feature takes place in a parallel-universe version of his native Canada where the dominant culture is Iranian, and the two main languages are Farsi and French.
More post-modern fairy tale than realistic drama, Universal Language feels no obligation to fill in any explanatory back story for its surreal remix of Canadian melting-pot history. Shortly before the film’s Cannes launch in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar, distribution deals were announced for North America. Other territories are yet to confirm, but Rankin’s highly engaging blend of pastiche, homage and deadpan comedy should have strong appeal to festivals and discerning art-house audiences.
As a young man, Rankin made a pilgrimage to Iran with ambitious plans to study film-making under directors like Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Abbas Kiarostami. The plan did not work out, but his love for these cinematic masters clearly stayed with him, and shapes the narrative of Universal Language with its fable-like episodes, poetic language, understated emotion and sardonic humour. There are other cinematic echoes in here, notably the heavily stylised absurdism of Rankin’s fellow Winnipeg indie film-maker Guy Maddin. In visual terms. cinematographer Isabella Stachtchenko frames the city’s brutalist concrete plazas, bland apartmet blocks and snowy parking lots with deliciously deadpan precision, creating an artfully minimal aesthetic that falls somewhere between Wes Anderson and Roy Andersson.
Crucially, however, Universal Language is much more than a cinematic love letter, and can be enjoyed on its own terms as a wry comic parable. Rankin patiently waves together multiple plots and characters, opening with pre-teen school students Negin (Rojina Esmaeili) and Nazgol (Saba Vahedyousefi), who discover a large banknote frozen in a block of ice. Meanwhile, eccentric tour guide Massoud (co-writer Pirouz Nemati) makes much-needed extra cash leading tourists around the key sights of Winnipeg, most of them bizarre fictions, and depressed Québecois civil servant Matthew (Rankin himself) quits his futile bureaucratic job and returns home to reconnect with his elderly, estranged mother. These three stories eventually converge and resolve in a lyrical, magical realist finale.
Universal Language is more tonally restrained and less self-consciously theatrical than Rankin’s debut feature, spoofy historical pageant The Twentieth Century (2019). That said, the two films share some stylistic tropes, including cross-gender casting choices and occasional lapses into mannered whimsy. A few of the jokes may also be too culturally specific for general viewers: satirical jabs at Québecois nationalist politics, for example, or a scene in which a long-abandoned suitcase is revealed as a UNESCO world heritage site, possibly a comment on Canada’s comically banal national myth-making.
That said, the film’s ironic undercurrents and subtle visual textures mostly work extremely well. Rankin and his design team made an inspired decision to apply a light patina of downtown Tehran to their Winnipeg locations, with school and shop signs in Arabic script, including a branch of the iconic Canadian coffee chain Tim Horton’s. In one office-set scene, the camera jump-cuts repeatedly between two opposite viewpoints but keeps the same wall-mounted photo centrally placed in every frame, a small but superbly choreographed sight gag.
Not just a pure exercise in style, Universal Language also feels like a personal passion project. There are skewed tributes to both the director’s deceased parents here, while the scene in which his semi-fictional alter ego revisits his former childhood home has a warm, tender, Proustian quality. In a further playful twist, the fake “original” Farsi title of Universal Language is Avaz Boughalamoune, which loosely translates as “Love Song for a Turkey”, a note-perfect pastiche name for the kind of vintage Iranian cinema classic that Rankin is invoking in this goofy but heartfelt midwinter night’s dream of a movie.
Director: Matthew Rankin
Cast: Regina Esmaeili, Saba Vahedyousefi, Sobhan Javadi, Pirouz Nemati, Matthew Rankin, Bahram Nabatian
Screenplay: Matthew Rankin, Pirouz Nemati, Ila Firouzabadi
Cinematography: Isabella Stachtchenko
Production design: Louisa Schabas
Editing: Xi Feng
Music: Amir Amiri, Christophe Lamarche-Ledoux
Producers: Sylvain Corbeil
Production company: Metafilms (Canada)
World sales: Best Friends Forever
Venue: Cannes film festival (Directors’ Fortnight)
In Farsi, French
89 minutes
