Director: Matthew Rankin
Writers: Ila Firouzabadi, Pirouz Nemati, Matthew Rankin
Cast: Matthew Rankin, Pirouz Nemati, Rojina Esmaeili
A group of Iranian children play in their classroom before the teacher arrives. Everyone quickly returns to their places when he walks in the door, but he knows what they were doing. He knows the kids were misbehaving. “And you didn’t even have the decency of misbehaving in French,” he tells them.
The mood is reminiscent of a classic Iranian film, think Where is the Friend’s House? or Downpour, but the name of the school, written in Farsi, is “Robert H. Smith School”, and outside the snow piles on the sidewalk. This is not Iran; it’s Manitoba, the capital of the Canadian province of Winnipeg, in a world where Farsi and not English is the main language of Canada.
So it starts the whimsical hallucination of Universal Language, directed by Canadian director Matthew Rankin and co-written by Rankin and two Iranian-Canadian writers, Ila Firouzabadi and Pirouz Nemati. A film that works hard to charm the viewers with its off-beat humour and pristine framing while being inspired by the work of classic Iranian filmmakers, particularly the work of Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi.
The film revolves freely around three seemingly disconnected stories that somehow converge. In one, two children, Negin (Rojina Esmaeili) and Nazgol (Saba Vahedyousefi) try to figure out a way to extract a bill they find frozen in the ice. In another, a stoic tour guide, Massoud (Pirouz Nemati), leads a confused crowd through the landmarks of Winnipeg – the grave of a Manitoban insurgent by the highway, a suitcase someone left on a bench, and no one has claimed, a shopping mall.
Finally, there is the story of Mathew (Rankin, not playing himself despite the similarities), a disappointed government worker from Quebec returning home to visit his mother.
Rankin flicks through the three stories with no intent to connect them narratively, but he keeps this interesting thread going thematically. How we perceive language and place is the most important question (French remains the language of Quebec). The signs are all in Farsi, but very little of that culture remains except a series of little details, and what I think is Rankin’s misunderstanding of the films of Kiarostami.
In a way, I understand what he’s trying to do. He’s questioning our own perception of place and belonging, re-enforcing how these notions are shaped by our patriotic fervour (like Matthew’s annoying Quebecois boss who confuses Alberta with Manitoba because he cares little about what happens outside of his province), by our nostalgia, or even by our personal sense of history. This Winnipeg Rankin presents is eerily like the real deal but sounds nothing like it. The signs on the buildings are all in Farsi, the Tim Hortons sells tea (the classic double-double – a shot of coffee with two shots of cream and two shots of sugar – is now two cups of tea), and everything has a dreamlike haze that confuses familiarity with perception.
The problem with this stylistic choice is that it is never completely justified. Because language means something, it’s inherent to our sense of place – even the sounds we create differ with the climate. Farsi is above most languages, dating more than 3000 years, and is spoken nowadays by more than 120 million people. It is the definition of language as a sense of culture, so I was surprised that Rankin wasn’t bringing that point into his own equation.
In reality, Universal Language feels more Manitoban than Iranian. The humour is reminiscent of the same gags as fellow Winnipegian Guy Maddin. Some of the gags, like the briefcase mentioned above and the odd quirks of the city, reminded me of Maddin’s hypnotic (but dumbfounding) My Winnipeg. It’s a specific humour, and deadpan, like a practical narrative joke. Maddin recently released the satire Rumours, which included a group of politicians finding a gigantic sentient brain in a forest and ended with a series of self-pleasing zombies listening to a political speech. It’s not for everyone, but it sounds doubly more confusing in Farsi.
Some jokes land, like a hilarious French-Canadian commercial playing in the background. A hilarious piece of French wordplay with a pitch-perfect yokel 80s aesthetic. But the rest of the film left me confused. Why this? Why play an Iranian when Rankin isn’t Iranian? There’s part of it that feels borderline orientalist – misrepresenting and stereotyping Asian culture. As the film progresses, the humour fades away, and Rankin finds these beautiful poetic moments for his characters that elevate them past the playfulness of before. Even Massoud, who is first introduced wearing a ridiculous pair of earmuffs, is given a sad, introspective and deeply personal conclusion to his journey. But even this beautiful moment doesn’t have a connection with one side of the culture it is representing.
It reminded me of Wes Anderson’s Darjeeling Limited. Not aesthetically, though, the comparison can easily be made (Rankin repeatedly said he wasn’t influenced by the work of Anderson, but no other director is so meticulous at framing his pictures and living effortlessly in the whimsical work they construct). What brought me back is how Anderson approached the narrative and visual influences (Indian cinema, especially the work of Satyajit Ray) with his own upbringing and influence. He does that by separating himself from the setting. Anderson’s film is about white people misunderstanding the culture they are trying to embrace. Rankin’s film starts by pretending he found a way to destroy the barriers that divide it. But he didn’t; from Manitoba, he gets the atmosphere, the humour and the thematic curiosity. From Iran, he gets the language and the facial hair. That’s not a fair balance.
Verdict: 2 out of 5
For fans of extremely esoteric dry heartland Canadian humour. Fans of Iranian cinema will do better to rent My Favourite Cake: it’s sadder, but the subversive Persian humour hits harder.