Little Tehran, Little Winnipeg
By Sarah Fensom
Universal Language
Dir. Matthew Rankin, Canada, Oscilloscope Laboratories
The sequence that perhaps best embodies the surreal layering of cultures in Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language is set in a Tim Hortons. The film unfolds primarily in Winnipeg, but the filmmaker has reimagined the city as a version of Tehran, with Farsi echoing throughout the bleak block-like buildings that characterize the Manitoban capital, and traditional Persian customs and manners punctuating the social interactions along the snow-covered Canadian sidewalks (the honorifics agha and khanum end most sentences). As such, Rankin’s version of the ubiquitous Canadian coffeehouse chain serves frosted donuts alongside steaming glasses of tea. Its walls are adorned with posters of padded-up hockey players featuring slogans in Perso-Arabic script. Its patrons, a slice of this version of Winnipeg’s community, wear both woolen tuques and richly patterned kerchiefs. In other words, the space is both Canadian and Persian, a simultaneity that Rankin renders with comic flair and warm, poetic sensitivity. Before we even see its interior, one character tells another, who plans to idle there for a while: “It’s actually a very beautiful Tim Hortons. And there’s a relaxing view of the highway. Time will pass quickly, agha.”
Rankin, a native of Winnipeg, has immersed himself in the Persian language, learning to speak and read Farsi. As a young man, he went to Tehran to study film at the Makhmalbaf Film School (only to discover that Iranian New Wave director Mohsen Makhmalbaf was no longer teaching). In this new work, he creates a sort of outward manifestation of this immersion, showing how much he’s come to know about this culture and how deeply important it is to him. Rankin uses Universal Language to conduct a dialogue with Iranian cinema, utilizing hallmarks of its New Wave masters. The director, for instance, plays a character named Matthew Rankin in the film in much the same way that Iranian filmmakers have roles in their own reflexive works. One of the film’s main conflicts, in which two young siblings, Negin and Nazgol, discover a 500 Rial bill (Iran’s currency and also the currency of Rankin’s Winnipeg) frozen in a block of ice, feels ripped from a film by Abbas Kiarostamiin the simplicity of its morally complex conceit. The siblings’ protracted attempts at retrieving the bill in order to help a classmate are stymied by someone, who, we learn later, seeks to help the same unfortunate child. It’s a minor, parabolic situation worthy of Jafar Panahi but set instead in the land of maple syrup, SCTV, and Métis history.
Universal Language owes much to Canadian—particularly Winnipeg’s—filmic tradition, as well, namely to the maudlin and bizarre sense of humor of Guy Maddin. Whereas Rankin’s first feature, The Twentieth Century (2019), resembled Maddin’s films on an aesthetic level, here the director delves into an interiority reminiscent of his work in another way. Like Maddin’s My Winnipeg, the city is reimagined through the mind of the filmmaker, and the results are strange, sad, and funny all at once. But where Maddin makes his interiority and personal history blatant, Rankin expresses his Winnipeg in a more mysterious manner. What we see in Universal Language is given no autobiographical context, and in this way, it’s less like Maddin’s tour through his own mind palace, and more like mainlining Rankin’s consciousness.
The film begins with a long exterior shot of a French language school, its boisterous students seen carousing through a classroom window. A teacher walks up the beige building’s steps, entering the artful wide shot. The misbehaving students freeze, caught, and their irate teacher lays into them. As the teacher’s shouting begins and the students scramble to their seats, Omid—the same unfortunate child mentioned above—waddles up the front stairs, his tardiness bearing the heavy weight of future punishment. Inside the classroom, Omid struggles to read a French sentence written on the chalkboard, then reluctantly admits to his teacher that he lost the glasses his father struggled to pay for in an altercation with a turkey. What ensues is a classroom undressing that’s vicious and over-the-top—equal parts About Dry Grasses and Eastbound and Down. After surveying the students on what they hope to be when they grow up—responses range from diplomat to donkey breeder—he insists, “All of you will fail, because it’s called reality.” Then he lights a cigarette and dismisses them.
Though it feels merely comedic at first, Omid’s fateful run-in with the turkey have consequences that ripple throughout the rest of the film, eventually unifying multiple seemingly disparate storylines. After happening upon the 500 rial bill in the ice, Negin and Nazgol have their hearts set on extracting it in order to buy Omid new glasses. Massoud, a local guide who is seen throughout the film giving tours, suggests that the siblings go to a nearby turkey farmer and borrow an axe to help free the money. After attempting to do so in vain, they return to find the bill—and Massoud—gone. Meanwhile, Rankin (the director playing himself) arrives in Winnipeg by bus from Montreal to visit his estranged mother. His attempts to see her lead him to the beautiful Tim Hortons described above and his childhood home, which is now occupied by another family, who embrace him heartily. Eventually, he finds his mother living in an apartment with Massoud and his family. When he speaks with her, Rankin realizes that she has swapped him and Massoud in her mind, believing him to be merely an acquaintance and the tour guide to be her son. In the midst of this discovery, Negin and Nazgol show up at Massoud’s apartment to confront him about the 500 Rial bill, only to discover that Omid is his son, and thus the beneficiary of the stolen money after all.
Idiosyncratic comic setups swirl around the narrative of the film, warming its edges. A cheap local commercial for the aforementioned turkey farm plays on the TV at Tim Hortons television, during which one of the business’s owners brags, “I sing poems to the turkeys every night so they will live calm and happy lives,” while the other insists, “we got the gravy!” A person wanders around unremarked upon with a Christmas tree on their head (a touch of Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks), becoming annoyed when the two siblings don’t have cigarettes to lend them. At a bingo hall, contestants compete to win a pyramid of Kleenex boxes for a local woman who can’t stop crying (a very Maddin concept). Every setup is played in earnest and without question or explanation, creating a fanciful, deadpan comic sensibility.
Universal Language’s tone slides from the banal to the fantastical, but there is a substratum of emotional vulnerability just below its quirky gags. Rankin’s character, after leaving his bureaucratic job in Quebec, seeks connection back at home with his mother. He fails to find it, instead developing new relationships along his journey, their quick closeness spurred on by taarof, the Persian custom of politeness and friendship. His immersion into this version of Winnipeg changes his identity, even if that’s somewhat against his will. In this way, the film mirrors the deep study of a foreign language, wherein the adoption of new terminology and mores imprint themselves on one’s consciousness. What makes Rankin’s film so utterly unique is that it doesn’t attempt to translate between the languages of Winnipeg and Tehran, but instead functions more as a brain that implicitly understands both.