VIFF 2024 | “Universal Language” and Cold Confluence in a Uniquely Cinematic Canada
11/12 ForReel Score | 4.5/5 Stars
During a walking tour of a craftily reimagined Winnipeg in Universal Language, we are told the Portage Place shopping mall no longer screens 3D films. “They’re too exciting,” says pink earmuff-adorned tour guide Massoud (Pirouz Nemati), “Now they only screen one-dimensional films.” Call this a bit of absurdist humour, a playful jab by writer-director Matthew Rankin at his own hometown, but within a single dimension—that is, a single coordinate, a point—is precisely how Rankin’s new film was conceptualized.
The follow-up to Rankin’s The Twentieth Century (2019), and Canada’s official submission to the Best International Feature category at the 97th Academy Awards, Universal Language is an expression of confluence, to borrow Rankin’s own word—a point of convergence where seemingly disparate elements find common ground and kinship. Just like the Assiniboine River joins with the Red in Winnipeg, so too does Rankin merge Canadian with Iranian in Winnipeg, transforming the cold-gripped, concrete-clad city into a satellite Tehran where everyone speaks Farsi but also knows the history of Louis Riel. Rankin does more than just “mashup” cultures, though, he uses his filmmaking and his filmic world as points of overlap, melding storytelling and cinematography styles from directors like Jafar Panahi and Roy Andersson; re-fabricating Winnipeg buildings with Persian signs and flinging the city back to a vaguely 80s period. There is even some French-Canadian representation with the storyline of Rankin’s self-insert character, as well as a touch of autobiography. It is the nexus point of these components that is vital—undoubtedly—but Universal Language is far from a one-dimensional film; it is multi-layered and thematically rich (not to mention idiosyncratic as all get-out).
At the same time, the film is a more restrained and deadpan effort from Rankin—especially considering the mad pageantry and histrionics of his previous feature. The interweaving storylines, concerning two young schoolmates (Saba Vahedyousefi and Rojina Esmaelli) who find 500 “Riels” entrapped in the ice, and a former employee of the Quebec government (Rankin) on his way home to reconnect with his roots, are told in a gradual manner, and are grounded in simple struggles reflecting a humble, humanistic perspective. The films of the Iranian New Wave are the most felt sources of inspiration in Universal Language, their humility and their minimalism shaping the film’s core. Similarly, the actors are all non-professionals, friends of Rankin’s and other members of Winnipeg’s Iranian community. But the Iranian New Wave was also known for its blending of fiction with reality/documentary, and its fable-like flourishes. Because Rankin comes from the school of artifice-enhancing Winnipeg eccentrics like Guy Maddin and John Paizs, these flourishes often veer into the surreal and the cartoonish. Paper shredders are sold on street corners in this filmic world, and turkeys have beauty competitions, while the highways flow with modern vehicles that defy the surrounding milieu.
The bizarre, parallel universe-sort of details included in Universal Language are realized in a uniquely filmic way, Rankin and co. pouring loving attention into every aspect of the mise en scène. Louisa Schabas’ production design turns the non-descript, brutalist facades of Winnipeg into quirky marketplaces, while theatrical lighting choices and expressive costumes allow the drab, frostbitten city—sectioned by Rankin into beige, grey, and brown districts—to thrum with warmth and colour. The 16mm, 1.66:1 ratio photography by Isabelle Stachtchenko evokes the filmic aesthetics of a bygone era, but it is her and Rankin’s eyes for shot composition that enhances this project, makes it feel the most like a fairytale or alternate timeline. In interviews with The Upcoming and Universal Cinema Magazine, Rankin speaks on his intention of using film to make images that strike one as new-feeling and sui-generis; images that displace the viewer. The frame he employs feels much less cluttered and fantastical than his German expressionism-referencing The Twentieth Century, but he uses less to accomplish a lot, giving us artful compositions even when it is predominantly white snow in the frame. Like the Iranian masters before him, he also emphasizes both the poetic and the peripheral, making his film feel less beholden to the “action” being depicted on screen than it is to the undercurrents of ennui and the curios of the filmspace.
In all these ways and more, Rankin’s film elevates itself beyond a mere cultural “mashup” experiment; beyond an “absurdist comedy,” as it has been labelled. “Universal” implies fundamental and easy to grasp, and there are certainly those types of themes present—themes of loneliness, empathy, and community come to mind (the film is dedicated to friendship)—but Rankin understands that films can also function to establish a sort of liminal zone, a psychic and spiritual zone where identities both ethnocultural, genealogical, and geographical can become pliable, fluid; where identities can be learned about and loved, even in their chimeric states. With his meticulously constructed, whimsically filmic vision of Winnipeg, Rankin evokes this zone—even despite the city’s frigid, brutalist, and beige trappings. Despite the reality that many audiences probably only think of Winnipeg in terms of a dot on a map, Rankin works to unfold an enchanting unreality, and thereby unveils in this dot—this single dimension—a universe, and a transcendentally “alternate” one at that.