Universal Language: a beautifully absurd crosscultural odyssey
Matthew Rankin follows in the surrealist footsteps of his debut The Twentieth Century (2019) with a brilliantly bizarre comedy that imagines a Canada where the two official languages are Farsi and French.
- Reviewed from the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival.
Films about Canadian national character are too often conflicting in scope, either discreetly appraising American culture with the camera angled slightly north, or peddling clichés of wide-eyed politesse and political incuriosity – methods which rarely account for the strains of colonialism and xenophobia particular to the region. The locale of Matthew Rankin’s endearing second feature Universal Language (Canada’s entry for the 2025 Academy Awards) challenges this lack with an imagined Canada where the two official languages are Farsi and French, a sly rerouting of Canadian traditions through Iranian culture and dialect.
Beginning in Winnipeg (Rankin’s hometown) by way of Tehran, the film deploys an instant sight gag: a middle school enveloped in snow which reads ‘Robert H. Smith School’ in Perso-Arabic lettering. Inside, irate French immersion teacher Mr. Bilodeau (Mani Soleymanlou) chides his students for arriving late or neglecting to speak en français, barrelling on in a blend of Farsi and French about how he sees little hope for human survival when looking at them. One student is scolded for forgetting his eyeglasses (they were pinched by a turkey, he says); another dons a Groucho Marx costume and is forced into the classroom’s closet.
On their way home, student Negin (Rojina Esmaeili), and her sister Nazgol (Saba Vahedyousefi) happen upon a 500 ‘Riel’ bill (a play on the Iranian Rial currency) preserved in the ice, which they become determined to liberate. They journey through Winnipeg’s brutalist neighbourhoods – named the Beige, Brown, and Grey Districts – in pursuit of a butcher’s axe or an iceman’s pick to break through it, courteously referring to the various men they encounter as “agha” (a Farsi term for ‘sir’ or ‘Mr.’) and scattering when asked where their parents are. Meanwhile, Rankin plays Matthew, a version of himself who quits his menial Quebec government job and treks home to the Canadian province of Manitoba in order to visit his sick mother. Taking the bus, he encounters Mr. Bilodeau, as well as a prized live turkey given its own seat.
These twin odysseys are clinched by Massoud (Pirouz Nemati), a tour guide of Winnipeg’s banalities: an abandoned briefcase on a bench (“marked as an UNESCO heritage site”) that’s now sprouting stems, an apartment complex home to nobody of note, an outlet mall with a shuttered fountain, and a commemorative monument of Manitoba founder Louis Riel at a busy intersection. The bizarreries which line the film are so plainly personal, a trait renewed by a quick swapping of actors’ roles in the last act to affirm the title’s universality and our comforting sameness.
Major touchstones include the works of Winnipeg auteur Guy Maddin and the deadpan scenarios of Roy Andersson, but the main sites of influence on Rankin’s latest are the childhood parables of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. The classroom sequences of Universal Language bear striking resemblance to Kiarostami’s 1987 film Where Is the Friend’s House?, and include an explicit nod to the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (or Kanoon), the artistic organisation which developed several of Kiarostami’s films. While some critics feel Universal Language is an egress from the director’s earlier work, Rankin directed a short film in 2008 called Sharhé-Halé Shakhsi: M. Rankin about himself “seen through the mystical postmodern prism of Iranian cinema”– a cultural preoccupation which evidently runs deep.
Universal Language follows in the surrealist tradition of Rankin’s gonzo debut The Twentieth Century (2019), which configures former Prime Minister of Canada William Lyon Mackenzie King’s sinuous ascent into power in 1899 as a bad trip, complete with foot fetishes, ejaculating cacti, and Quebecois nationalism. Gentler parodies animate Universal Language (no such perversities or humiliation rites, but several jabs at French Canadians), in which absurdism guides us toward a better way of life. The streets are lined with signposts of supposed Canadian enterprises: Kleenex repositories (the tissue company just folded in Canada this year) and delicatessens to suit the turkey magnates, while the children have a three swing quota on the playground and partake in reenactments of ‘The Great Parallel Parking Incident of 1958.’
It is unclear how this cocktail of Canadian and Iranian iconography will square with international viewers, who may not impulsively belly laugh at the image of coffeehouse chain Tim Hortons refurbished with Farsi signage and samovars, or pharmacies aestheticising the Canada’s canary-yellow No Name brand. (Maddin’s Rumours, which also screened at TIFF this year, inflates Canada’s position on the world stage with similar fervour). For all its warmth, the temperamental mythologies of Universal Language contain genuine revisionist efforts and a riposte to xenophobia, cultivating a landscape driven by community care, farcical schemes, and loose turkeys.