Movie Review: ‘Universal Language’ needs to be seen to be believed

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This article was published 13/02/2025 (614 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s not unusual for a city to double for another metropolis in movies. New Yorkers have long been able to spot when Toronto has been substituted for the Big Apple. Matthew Rankin, though, has gone more than a step, or maybe 85 steps, further.

His “Universal Language” takes place in Winnipeg, Manitoba, but the culture is entirely Iranian. Farsi is the spoken tongue. At Tim Hortons, tea is served from samovars. It’s as if we’ve been knocked over the head and woken up in some snowy, Canadian version of an Abbas Kiarostami film.

And in Rankin’s surreal and enchantingly discombobulating film, that’s more or less the case. No reason is ever stated for the strange, deadpan fusion of Winnipeg reality and Iranian New Wave cinema. But there’s that title. If cinema is a universal language, it’s never been more elastically employed, bridging worlds 6,000 miles apart for a singular kind of movie dream, like what Rankin might have spun in his head while drifting off to sleep on a Manitoba winter night while Kiarostami’s “Where Is the Friend’s House?” played on TV.

It’s both an extremely exact homage to the films of Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi and other Iranian masters, and a comic lament for how distant their movies might feel for a Winnipegian director. Rankin has joked that “Universal Language” brings together the rich poetry of Iranian filmmaking and a Canadian cinema that emerged “out of 50 years of discount furniture commercials.”

The gags start immediately, with an opening title logo for “A Presentation of the Winnipeg Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young People” — a twist on the Iranian institute that produced ’70s classics, like Kiarostami’s Koker trilogy.

Like those films, Rankin’s is framed with kids. In the first scene, a displeased French teacher (Mani Soleymanlou) chastises his young students for speaking Persian. One child, an aspiring comedian. is dressed as Groucho Marx. Another says a turkey stole his glasses. Another wants to be a Winnipeg tour guide. The teacher asks them all to read from their book. In unison they read: “We are lost forever in this world.”

“Universal Language,” scripted by Rankin, Ila Firouzabadi and Pirouz Nemati, lightly juggles a handful of characters we intermittently check in with. That includes an adult tour guide (Pirouz Nemati), whose attractions include the site of “the Great Parallel Parking Incident of 1958.” There are also two girls (Rojina Esmaeili and Saba Vahedyousefi) who find a banknote frozen in ice. A character named Matthew Rankin (played by Rankin) is traveling to Winnipeg by bus to visit his ailing mother after departing his bureaucratic job in Montreal. Oh, and there are turkeys. Lots and lots of turkeys.

Rankin’s film, his second following the also surreal “Twentieth Century” (2019), is propelled less by narrative thrust than the abiding oddity of its basic construction, and the movie’s slavish devotion to seeing it through without a wink. As the movie moves along in formally composed shots, something wistful takes shape about the possibilities of connection and of insurmountable distances.

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I’ve twice now seen “Universal Language,” a prize-winner in Cannes’ Directors Fortnight last year that was shortlisted for the best international Oscar, and I still barely believe it exists. Rankin’s movie, in melding two worlds, risks taking place in neither, of letting its cinephile concept snuff out anything authentic. But while I’m not, at the moment, begging for a subsequent French New Wave movie set in Saskatchewan, I’ve not gone long without thinking about “Universal Language.” I guess Rankin’s movie dream has filtered into those of my own.

“Universal Language,” an Oscilloscope Laboratories. release, is not rated by the Motion Picture Association. In Farsi and French. Running time: 89 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.