I was recently lucky enough to catch Canadian director Matthew Rankin’s second feature, Universal Language, at the Leeds International Film Festival. I’d heard the title mentioned, but prior to booking my tickets had no idea what the film was about, nor any expectations for it. Now that I have seen it, I can safely say it’s one of my favourites of the year, and I felt compelled to give it its own write up outside of my general review of LIFF.
What’s immediately striking about the film is its setting. It takes place in a slightly tilted version of Winnipeg that has been combined with Tehran. The film features the typical hallmarks of Canada – mainly through snow and Tim Hortons – but everyone speaks Farsi, and Iranian culture is imbued into the setting. This merging creates a completely unique world for the film to take place in. It isn’t portrayed as some science-fiction parallel universe, and it all feels very subtly blended to create a place that feels very grounded and real.
The film has its roots in Rankin’s own life. He moved to Iran in his early 20s and stated that, being inspired by the great Iranian masters, he “had this very naive idea that I could go there and study cinema”. While this didn’t work out, as Rankin returned to Winnipeg to study film instead, his reverence for Iranian film and the connections he made there are clear within the film. It results in a world where the cultural crossover is not just for aesthetic, but is deeply felt.
The opening scene of the film illustrates this all perfectly. We are greeted with a blank, stark architecture that characterises the city, surrounded by a very Canadian level of snow, with the difference being the Persian writing on the outside of the building. This building is a French language school in which a teacher, played with great silly intensity by Mani Soleymanlou, scolds his class for not speaking in French as he himself switches between French and Farsi.
The scene grows more and more absurd as a child dressed as Groucho Marx appears and is promptly put in a cupboard, and the whole class is expelled because one of the boys had his glasses stolen by a turkey. It works incredibly well as an encapsulation of the film’s world and comedic stylings.
You’d think the narrative is then going to follow these children, as we see two siblings in the class find a 500 Rial note (this version of Winnipeg also uses Iranian currency) frozen in ice and decide to thaw it out so they can buy new glasses for the child that got them all expelled. And while the film does follow them a little, it also introduces more storylines that merge as the film goes on.
Perhaps the most prominent of these is that of a man called Matthew, played by Matthew Rankin essentially as a version of himself, who leaves his office job in Quebec to return to Winnipeg where his mother lives. This is where the emotional heart of the film really kicks into gear: the reluctant journey home that Matthew takes is both very sweet, and quite melancholic.
The multiple narrative threads are great excuses to show off the film’s world, which is a blast. Some prominent locations include: an incredibly eccentric turkey shop, a bench that someone left a suitcase on in the 70s and has since become a UNESCO world heritage site, a Kleenex shop which is just a building covered head to toe in boxes of tissues, and the site of the “Great Parallel Parking Incident of 1958”.
Despite any encroaching elements of sadness, the film never forgets that it is a comedy, and a funny one at that. The potentially contrasting tones work together remarkably well. Universal Language is a piece all about contradictions and odd pairings, but it never ends up feeling uneven, balancing everything wonderfully.
Playing into all these contradictions is the film’s absolute commitment to artificiality. I know earlier in this review I said that the world feels real, and I stand by that, but it also feels completely constructed in a way most films would avoid like the plague.
This isn’t just because of the film’s surreal elements, as it is baked into so many technical elements of the film. One great example is a scene early on when Matthew resigns from his job as a civil servant. The camera flips from one side of the conversation to the other in a way that completely flaunts basic rules of film, leaving the characters looking like they’re teleporting from side to side, completely throwing off the viewer and forcefully breaking immersion.
But it manages to do this in a way which never feels too pretentious. There are no fourth-wall breaks or references to characters being in a film, and the film is consistently meta without falling into the traps of becoming annoying (which is not something many ‘meta’ films achieve). Instead, the artificiality just feels fun more than anything – like people who are good at what they do playing around with a medium they love and adding to the comedy of it all.
All these weird and contradictory elements somehow come together to make something that is consistently funny, heartfelt, and oddly beautiful. Universal Language is a film which completely came out of nowhere and blew me away. Unfortunately, there is no word on UK distribution for it just yet, but I have a great deal of hope for it. So while you won’t be able to see it yourself for a little while, keep it tucked away in your head and leap at any chance there is to see it.
5/5
