By Robert St. Martin & Valerie Milano
Palm Springs, CA (The Hollywood Times) 1/5/25 – On Sunday, January 5 at the Palm Springs International Film Festival was a screening of Universal Language (Une langue universell) – a 2024 Canadian absurdist comedy-drama film, co-written and directed by Matthew Rankin. It was selected as the Canadian entry for Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards. Described as a “surreal comedy of disorientation” set “somewhere between Tehran and Winnipeg,” the film blends the seemingly unrelated stories of Negin and Nazgol, two school children in a French immersion school in Quebec, who happen to find money frozen in ice and try to claim it. Meanwhile, Massoud (Pirouz Nemati), a tour guide in Winnipeg who is leading a confused and disoriented tour group to view his favorite cultural landmarks in the freezing school. Finally, Matthew (Rankin) quits his unfulfilling job with the provincial government of Quebec and travels home by bus to Winnipeg to visit his mother. The film will screen again Monday, January 6, at 5:30 pm in the Mary Pickford 10 and on Thursday, January 9, 1:30 pm at the Mary Pickford 10.
Despite being set in a parallel-universe Winnipeg where the people talk in Farsi (Persian)and the world around them seems as if it’s been frozen in time since the mid-1980s (when Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and the other masters of Iranian meta-realism were exploding onto the international stage), the haunted but hopeful Universal Language is an unmistakably modern film at heart.
Described by writer-director Matthew Rankin as a piece of “autobiographical hallucination,” this wonderfully deadpan whatsit is the work of a white 43-year-old Canadian man who fell in love with the movies at a time when “foreign” cinema was becoming more available to people outside major cultural hubs. He found Kanoon-style fables like Where Is the Friend’s House? and The White Balloon spoke to him in a way that few English-language films ever had.
That discovery sparked a cross-cultural dialogue that eventually compelled Rankin to visit Tehran in an effort to locate the auteurs who had inspired him and learn why their films had whispered in his ear. Rankin’s search didn’t come up empty so much as it led him all the way back home to Winnipeg, where – in close collaboration with co-writers Pirouz Nemati and Ila Firouzabadi – he was newly able to appreciate that boundarylessness itself can be one of cinema’s greatest virtues.
The Kaurismäki-dry comedy that resulted from that realization is a hyper-specific creation steeped in local Canadian lore, one based on an incident that happened to the director’s late grandmother, and altogether so personal to Rankin’s lived experience that he stars in it as a version of himself. Universal Language is first and foremost a testament to the shared artifice of all filmic storytelling, and to the singular realities it’s able to bring alive in turn.
In Winnipeg, children set themselves on eccentric quests – or dress like Groucho Marx – to flummox the adults around them, occasionally disrupting a tour group led by the flustered Massoud (Pirouz Nemati) as he does his best to explain the city’s curious landmarks. Meanwhile, in Montreal, government wonk Matthew (played by Rankin himself) quits a job he hates and catches the first bus home to Manitoba to see his mother, only to find his family is not what he thought it was.
Rankin has said “the movie is about “how ‘there’ is also ‘here,’ and how everybody around you is also you,” and while a less sincere take on the same conceit might have exploited it in the service of such nice ideas, this one – which openly draws not just from the Iranian masters, but also from Wes Anderson, Roy Andersson, Elia Suleiman, and more – maintains the courage of its convictions until it achieves a mysteriously sad kind of soul transference in its final moments. So far as Universal Language is concerned, there is nothing more beautiful than being able to recognize ourselves in each other, and nothing more tragic than denying ourselves that chance. Don’t be fooled by all of the analog throwback charm: This is a bittersweet lament for an interconnected age where people have every opportunity to appreciate what they have in common, but lack the vision needed in order to see it clearly.
Winner of the inaugural Directors’ Fortnight audience award at Cannes this year, Matthew Rankin’s film is a follow-up to his eccentric, surreal The Twentieth Century (2019) in this gentle sort of comedy, settling us down in a reimagined Canada where Persian and French are the two official languages… and loneliness is the common currency.
The films of Abbas Kiarostami and his New Iranian Cinema contemporary Mohsen Makhmalbaf are Rankin’s most obvious touchstones here, but one also recognizes the influence of the Swedish absurdist Roy Andersson and the Winnipeg’s own Guy Maddin, all filtered through Rankin’s deadpan comic sensibility. He’s traded the gleeful depravity of The Twentieth Century for something kinder and softer, an affectionate look at a diasporic nation trying to fit itself into a box that can’t contain it. Don’t worry, people still congregate at Tim Hortons. (Always Fresh!) It’s just that their idea of a double-double is a little different.
