By Jake Wilson
UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE
★★½
(G) 89 minutes
Selected cinemas from May 22
The idea of cinema as a universal language originally took root in the era of silent film, when it was hoped that this newly invented art form would allow communication across cultures as never before, perhaps even helping to bring about world peace.
Universal Language, the eccentric second feature by Canadian director Matthew Rankin, renews this dream after its own fashion, unfolding in the hypothetical country that would be brought into existence if Canada and Iran were superimposed on each other.
Rojina Esmaeili and Saba Vahedyousefi find a banknote stuck in ice in one of the film’s subplots.
But Rankin’s title can also be understood ironically, since the upshot is a film that almost any viewer, regardless of background, is liable to find disconcerting and alien.
Rankin’s interest in Iran is not a passing fancy. Most of the film’s action takes place on the snowy streets of Winnipeg, but the majority of the dialogue is in Persian, with the rest in French (the screenplay was written with two Iranian collaborators, Ila Firouzabadi and Pirouz Nemati, who appear on camera).
Special tribute is paid throughout to the most celebrated of all Iranian filmmakers, the late Abbas Kiarostami, whose hallmarks include long takes and extreme wide shots, the use of non-professional actors, including children, and outwardly trivial plots with multiple levels of meaning.
One of several subplots here involves a couple of schoolgirls (Rojina Esmaeili and Saba Vahedyousefi) who happen upon a banknote frozen in ice – a premise reportedly taken from an anecdote told by Rankin’s grandmother, but also an echo of the struggle to retrieve a banknote which falls down a drain at the climax of Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon, which Kiarostami scripted.
The action unfolds in Winnipeg, but the world is one that imagines an Iran in Canada.
Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s House? is another touchstone, including in a subplot featuring Rankin himself as a government employee who returns home to Winnipeg in search of his mother.
Universal Language is not hard to follow, but I have little doubt that it contains a large number of in-jokes I just didn’t get, included for the benefit of Iranian and Canadian viewers alike.
The dry silliness of the humour feels entirely Canadian: Kiarostami’s dialogue is often deliberately simple and repetitive, but Rankin takes this a step further, having his characters speak in flat non-sequiturs as if reading from an absurdist phrasebook. “My sons choked to death in a marshmallow-eating contest” is a representative example, as is the statement from a tour guide that a former 3D cinema now only screens “one-dimensional films”.
Gradually it becomes clear that beyond all the arcane joking this is a film about loss and loneliness, and about the reassuring notion that despite appearances we are all connected – which Rankin evidently believes, or wants to believe, even if he feels obliged to place this potentially corny sentiment behind a layer of protective irony.
The banknote buried under the ice could be an image of this, and I can imagine in principle how it might be possible to find Universal Language a moving experience, even without being familiar with any of its reference points. But I’m bound to say it left me pretty cold.
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