Moze Halperin
Nationalism gives way to interhuman solidarity in the dreamy, generous world of Matthew Rankin’s latest film.
Still from Universal Language. Courtesy Oscilloscope Laboratories.
Universal Language, directed by Matthew Rankin, now playing at the Angelika Film Center, 18 West Houston Street, New York City
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In Crime Wave (1985), Winnipeg filmmaker John Paizs’s meta-homage to ’50s B movies, a spirited preteen explains the neurocinematic trick by which we synthesize stills into forward motion and narrative: “Did you know that since it takes a projector more time to move between frames than to project them, we’re actually looking at a blank screen for longer than anything?” In Universal Language, something of an homage to Winnipeg cinema’s knack for homage, director Matthew Rankin and his co-screenwriters-producers Ila Firouzabadi and Pirouz Nemati harness film’s magical artifice to build their own imagistic bridges. Universal Language superimposes a vintage Tehran onto a cryogenic Winnipeg, uniting the concerns of not only self-deprecating Winnipegger weirdos like Paizs and Guy Maddin but also self-reflexive realist Iranian New Wave directors such as Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi. Cinephilic pastiche becomes a language—poetic, if not so universal—with which the movie constructs a collaboratively imagined city. For a droll, dreamy ninety minutes, the mind can blur away the distances of a world atomized by zealous reinforcements of national and personal identity.
Still from Universal Language. Courtesy Oscilloscope Laboratories.
A frozen feast of surreal cinematic, cultural, and linguistic portmanteaux, Universal Language originated with a simple childhood story told by Rankin’s grandmother about finding an icebound $2 bill in the ground and beginning an expedition through Winnipeg to procure the tools to remove it. Rankin, Firouzabadi, and Nemati processed this mundane Manitoban tale through the idiom of films produced in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s by Tehran’s Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (Kanoon), which often center gumptious kids in stories of grown-up complexity.
The opening credits clue us in to the film’s defining interplay: “A Presentation of the Winnipeg Institute for the Intellectual Development of Young People” appears right before a scene recalling the beginning of Kiarostami’s 1987 Kanoon film Where Is the Friend’s House?: both focus on the rigid architecture of a school before delving inside as a haughty teacher rails against his young pupils—in each case, a catalyst for a juvenile’s winding altruistic quest to help a classmate.
Rojina Esmaeili as Negin in Universal Language. Courtesy Oscilloscope Laboratories.
While walking home through a snowy maze of wan brick behemoths, one student, Negin (Rojina Esmaeili), and her older sister, Nazgol (Saba Vahedyousefi), find ice-entombed money, à la Grandma Rankin. (This similarly instigates a mission to extract the bill and purchase their peer a new pair of glasses—since a turkey purloined his.) Another thread follows a dutiful Winnipeg tour guide, Massoud (played by Nemati), aggrandizing greige attractions: he points out, to a gaggle of grousing tourists, a bench and the iconic unattended briefcase preserved atop it (a UNESCO heritage site, naturally); a commemorative sculpture of revolutionary Métis leader and Manitoba founder Louis Riel sandwiched into a highway gore; a “magnificent fresco” that’s just the facade of a nondescript apartment block.
Matthew Rankin as Matthew Rankin and Dara Najmbadi as Dara in Universal Language. Courtesy Oscilloscope Laboratories.
A third plot tracks a deadened Montréal bureaucrat named Matthew Rankin (played by the director) as he returns home to see his bedridden mother. Autobiography pervades the movie, if not always explicitly: as Rankin has noted in interviews, Nemati’s tour guide reflects his late father’s fondness for “Winnipeg’s bland monuments”; the children reanimate his grandmother’s story; and, most directly, Rankin’s character is disoriented and deracinated by parental illness and loss. (Real-life Rankin’s mother died in 2020 and his father shortly before.) He is welcomed back into spaces of hygge hybridity—for instance, a Tim Horton’s reimagined as a Persian tearoom—from the cold of the urban tundra and his expressionless, etiolated condition.
Still from Universal Language. Courtesy Oscilloscope Laboratories.
In this charmingly drab liminal world, the line between reality and unreality has collapsed alongside so many other borders. Turkeys wander the streets and occupy bus seats, to the chagrin of a woman who complains to the driver that she’s suffered too much in life to have to sit next to poultry—her “sons choked to death in a marshmallow eating contest” and her neighbors “steal her rhubarb.” Other fanciful visions of heartsickness in human form include a crooning turkey-store proprietor; a “lacrimologist” who hands out tissues at a funeral for a cat; a man alone in a neglected mall, jiggling in a massage chair.
Still from Universal Language. Courtesy Oscilloscope Laboratories.
If this city’s inhabitants seem glaciated in sadness, acts of generosity pervade and thaw the film. Likewise, Universal Language’s Winnipeg, in which Brutalist structures’ uncompromising geometry frame figures in treeless, concrete visions of harsh symmetry and order, makes its fluidity and porousness feel like mirthful miracles.
In The Twentieth Century (2019), Rankin’s draggy riff on early twentieth-century Canadian history, the filmmaker treated the construction of national identity in the colonial patchwork of Canada as a chintzy vaudevillian parade of outfits and stage sets. Universal Language’s approach is softer than that satirical fantasia, and more indelible, as it proposes nations and identities as the palimpsests they are.
Temporally, spatially, and politically decontextualized facets of Persian culture blanket the postindustrial city that sits near the latitudinal middle of North America. Signs are written in Perso-Arabic and French; Winnipeg rockers the Guess Who’s 1968 song “These Eyes” has, on this plane, always been in Farsi. Here, French remains the language of Quebec while Farsi is the default for the rest of Canada—razzing the colonial construct of English as both a Canadian and global “universal language.” The currency the sisters find is neither a Canadian dollar nor an Iranian rial, but a “riel”—imprinted with a portrait of Riel—the anti-nationalist figure’s omnipresence speaking to the film’s creolized world and rejection of calcified borders.
Matthew Rankin as Matthew Rankin in Universal Language. Courtesy Oscilloscope Laboratories.
Similar to the ways Maddin reconstitutes his childhood as a kitschy black-and-white collage in his docu-dream My Winnipeg (2007), Rankin, in his film, lovingly deflates the monumentalizing gesture of autobiography via parallel self-deprecating attempts to monumentalize the Manitoban capital. Rankin’s self-insertion also dizzyingly piles more layers into his oneiric echo of Where Is the Friend’s House?: it nods to Kiarostami’s And Life Goes On (1992), which followed an avatar of the director as he searched for the child actors from the 1987 film in the aftermath of an earthquake.
One of Universal Language’s biggest risks is that it could seem like a too-reverential, film-nerdy hodgepodge—an ironically niche and unapproachable argument for universalism. It could seem like a feature-length Criterion Closet Picks: My bag’s already so full, but how could I not take a little tonal Roy Andersson with me? While such a movie might sound exhaustingly pedantic, Universal Language’s dense intertextuality goes wonderfully unexplained—foregrounding instead an emotional logic, lyricism, and affection in this frigorific city of allusions.
Rankin described the film in Interview as an “expression of . . . idealistic longing” in a “binary, rigid age.” While cultural discourse slowly moves beyond the era of authenticity and identity essentialism—in which art often reified and exalted the individual—the project of right-wing nationalism that leveraged counter-discourse into global power fortifies its own fanatical identitarianism. Are these external realities in part the source of the mournful feeling in Universal Language that seeps into whimsy like cold trying to freeze a dream solid? The film’s gentle response is to poke holes in nationhood, and reroute autobiography away from any notion of an authentic self, toward a formerly unhip pluralistic universalism. Massoud describes, at one point, how the UNESCO briefcase-bench ultimately became “a monument to absolute inter-human solidarity, even at its most banal.” Collaboratively melted down and reframed, so, too, does “Matthew Rankin.”
Moze Halperin is a Brooklyn-based film and theater critic.