Speaking in (many) tongues Winnipeg-set comedy Universal Language fluently articulates city’s quirks
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/01/2025 (591 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Hilariously local, generously universal, this brilliant and odd absurdist comedy is set in Winnipeg by way of Tehran.
Imagining a wintry burg where the Tim Hortons signs are in Farsi and Jeanne’s cakes and Old Dutch potato chips are sold in a freezing open-air bazaar, Matthew Rankin (The Twentieth Century), a Manitoba-born filmmaker now based in Montreal, shows us a city that is once nostalgically familiar and wondrously new.
Movie Review
Universal Language
Starring: Matthew Rankin, Pirouz Namati, Rojina Esmaeili and Saba Vahedyousefi
• Polo Park, Friday
• 89 minutes, PG
★★★★★ out of five
Universal Language (in Farsi and French, with English subtitles) gently circles in time and space, as characters wander this strange urban terrain, their lives and histories intersecting and overlapping in ways both funny and moving.
Rankin plays a character named Matthew Rankin, who has resigned from his government job in Quebec and come home to Winnipeg to search for a mother he seems to have somehow mislaid.
Elementary school students Negin (Rojina Esmaeili) and sister Nazgol (Saba Vahedyousefi) have happened upon some money trapped in ice and are hunting for a way to liberate it. (Our currency now honours Louis Riel, and this 50 Riel note will be enough to help out a classmate who lost his eyeglasses in a tussle with one of Winnipeg’s wild turkeys.)
Meanwhile, Massoud (Pirouz Namati) is leading an increasingly bewildered group of tourists on a kind of anti-picturesque walking tour, taking in the dry fountains of Portage Place mall, a historic bus bench (recently designated a UNESCO world heritage site) and our city’s many parking structures, freeways and underpasses.
Often using long shots that fix small vertical figures in a vast horizontal landscape, Rankin finds an offbeat, almost exotic beauty in dull skies and dirty snow, in looming walls of raw concrete and in the plaintive sound of prairie trains.
Along with these sights, common enough in a Winnipeg January, this city also has some fantastical additions, such as the Kleenex Repository, made necessary by an unprecedented amount of civic crying, and the “lachrymologist” who attends funerals, handing out tissues and collecting tears.
Universal Language celebrates its many cinematic influences while remaining stubbornly its own weird thing. Rankin riffs on the Iranian New Wave, particularly its empathetic treatment of the lives of children. We see this in the story’s wise sisters (beautifully underplayed by Vahedyousefi and Esmaeili), so mournfully resigned to the arbitrary cruelties and caprices of adults.
There are references to Nordic filmmakers such as Roy Andersson and Aki Kaurismaki, not just in the chilly settings but in the deadpan humour and unafraid stretches of silence.
There are intertextual overlaps with the work of Guy Maddin, especially his docu-fantasia My Winnipeg, with one scene echoing Maddin’s notion that Winnipeggers compulsively return to — and are always invited into — their former homes.
And then there are Rankin’s own recurring obsessions, seen in his many short films, some created here with the influential film collective L’Atelier national du Manitoba — government bureaucracy, Esperanto, low-budget local TV adverts, civic slogans, postwar apartment building signage and Burton Cummings.
Rojina Esmaeili plays elementary school student Negin in Universal Language. 
There are loads of Peg-centric jokes, but even viewers who don’t get the insanely specific, detailed and ingenious Winnipeg references will find a rueful and recognizable human comedy. (It should be pointed out that the aptly titled Universal Language has been snagging rave reviews even from critics who’ve never been north of the 49th parallel.)
And while the film is laugh-out-loud funny — literally — it is also, by the end, as the wandering characters are finally brought together, ineffably sad and delicate.
Rankin’s work has always been clever and comic, but there’s a new tenderness here as the filmmaker brings in autobiographical strands, fusing them into a poetic expression of regret, longing and the meaning of home and family.
These are poignant, resonant themes that viewers all around the world can take in. Those Farsi-inflected allusions to Kern-Hill Furniture Co-op commercials, on the other hand, are just for us.
fparts@freepress.mb.ca
Other Voices
Telefilm Canada Even viewers who don’t get the Peg-centric jokes will find a rueful and recognizable human comedy.
Rankin’s Winnipeg exists in one place and one place only: his wonderfully wry mind. It is a destination well worth the visit.
— Barry Hertz, Globe and Mail
It’s difficult to find suitable words to describe Matthew Rankin’s Persian-language, Canadian film, Universal Language, without diminishing its original vision and singular whimsicality.
— Namrata Joshi, The New Indian Express
By converting his drab hometown into an exotic land filled with nostalgia, Rankin seems to be seeking out the universal language of cinema itself. In his own very weird way he manages to find it.
— Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter
Universal Language is a magnificent film, one that feels warm and familiar even as we realize just how startlingly original it is.
— Bilge Ebiri, New York Magazine
Oscilloscope Laboratories Matthew Rankin’s own recurring obsessions such as Esperanto, low-budget local TV adverts and postwar apartment building signage are present.
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Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto’s York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian. She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992.
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