‘Universal Language’: Cannes Review

Dir: Matthew Rankin. Canada. 2024. 89mins

Matthew Rankin’s conceptual, playful Universal Language – in which Iran is transposed onto Winnipeg, or vice versa – is by turns arch and over-arching. While this lightly comic caper is a pleasing homage to beloved Iranian cinema, set in the snowy-beige anonymity of Winnipeg, it also owes a deep aesthetic debt to the deliberate mise-en-scene of Wes Anderson, to studied effect. Revolving, like the best Iranian cinema, around children whose quest (in this case, to release a banknote trapped in the ice) catapults them into the vagaries of the adult world, it has a charming everything-is-connected arc which saves it from a tendency towards stiltedness.

Doggedly eccentric

The second feature from Matthew Rankin after The Twentieth Century (which won the FIPRESCI prize at Berlin and Best Canadian Feature at Tiff), Universal Language is co-written by the Canadian native and it also features him in a leading role speaking Farsi (as with the rest of the all-Iranian cast). His devotion to Iran, according to the film’s materials, began with an admiration for the country’s cinema and led to a frustrated attempt to study there. There’s little doubt that this has led to a unique film, which will pique the curiosity of patient festivals and buyers at the very least. As interesting as it is as an exercise, though, it’s not always quite so compelling as a film.

Universal Language’s debt to Anderson, and his production designer Adam Stockhausen, is evident in the film’s first long, establishing shots. We look at the carefully framed-within-a-frame window of a school building from a distance, as a teacher and then a child trudge through the snow to join the fray inside. Once he arrives, the irascible teacher is so casually insensitive to his students (“when I look at you I see little hope for human survival”), it is clear there is some trick at play. We’ve been taken to Iran-in-Winnipeg, in which the currency is the rial and chain restaurant Tim Horton’s has become a Samovar-laden Tehran teashop.

Amidst further static shots — a greige car park, a memorial situated by a highway intersection – the plot reveals itself in still takes. Sight gags are inescapable. Young student Omid (Siobhan Javadi) has lost his glasses to a rampaging turkey and his teacher won’t take class again until he can see the blackboard. His determined friend Negin (Rojina Esmaeili, the film’s most appealing actor) and her sister Nazgûl (Saba Vahedyousefi) become involved in a quest to lift a rial note from the frozen ice to pay for a new pair of specs. This brings them into contact with tour guide Massoud (Pirouz Nemati), easily the film’s most difficult character to get on with.

Dressed in a beige suit but wearing neon pink earmuffs, Massoud is devoted to leading bored tour groups around Winnipeg’s less obvious cultural attractions – the car park, for example, or a bench where a briefcase was once left behind. Fitfully amusing/irritating, he fortunately comes into his own later on in the plot. Then there’s sad sack Matthew (Rankin himself), who leaves his job in the big city to come home to Winnipeg and his childhood home. He’s also a greige-wearer: one of the film’s jokes is to direct the two girls to find an axe in the ‘beige district’ which lies beyond the city’s ‘brown district’.

Universal Language is doggedly eccentric, something that’s mirrored in its exaggerated aesthetic. There’s a pink cowboy-hatted singing turkey-shop worker; a man wandering around wearing a lit Christmas tree over his body; an absurdist bingo hall where men and women are interchangeable. Inside a pharmacy, all the labels are a generic Adam Stockhausen tribute — only they’re beige. There’s also a ‘Kleenex repository’ and reference made to a ‘Winnipeg Earmuff Authority’. Sad-eyed characters say things like: “My son choked to death in a marshmallow-eating contest,” or “she was flattened in a steamrolling accident”.You could call it whimsical. Absurdist. Contrived. Or an unexpectedly unusual concept album that doesn’t quite come off but was worth the effort. And you would be correct every time.