The jokes I most enjoy are very specific, aimed at some tiny cross section of people who possess a peculiar shared set of reference points. Sure, broadly crowd-pleasing comedy is a hoot. But when you sense something is funny because it was made for you, and so there are other people like you, too — that’s one of the best feelings art can provoke.
“Universal Language,” directed by Matthew Rankin, is a gently funny, gently moving, slightly surrealist little comedy that’s aimed at two groups of people: Canadians, specifically but not exclusively those who know Winnipeg, and aficionados of Iranian cinema. Surely there’s overlap between the two circles in that Venn diagram, but I can’t imagine it’s all that substantial. Combining the two cultural specificities, though, makes for something fresh and weird and delightful to watch — even if, like me, you’re not an expert on either one.
Even before the movie begins, onscreen text proclaims that this is “A Presentation of the Winnipeg Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young People.” No such agency exists: It’s a sly wink at cinephiles, who may know that a similar institute — the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults — produced some of the classic Iranian films in the 1970s and ’80s, including some early children’s films from the celebrated director Abbas Kiarostami. Rankin even uses a logo for his fictitious institute that looks suspiciously like the Iranian one.
Actually, the onscreen text that I could read was in English subtitles, because the logo was rendered in Persian — unexpected for a purportedly Winnipeg-based organization. It’s the first indication that this movie is not set in a world strictly like our own. In their screenplay, Rankin, Ila Firouzabadi and Pirouz Nemati came up with a world that is sort of a thought experiment: What if Tehran were Winnipeg? Or Winnipeg were Tehran? What if the landscapes were snowy, the Tim Hortons were teahouses and everyone spoke Persian?
Persian and French, technically — this is Canada after all. There’s no reason given for this alt-historical fact: This is just normal Canada but with Iranian cultural traditions having fully melded with Canadian ones for whatever reason. In fact, the first scene is set in a French-immersion language school full of rambunctious children, including one dressed up as Groucho Marx (cigar included) and one, named Omid (Sobhan Javadi), who insists that a turkey stole his glasses. The ill-tempered teacher (Mani Soleymanlou), who excoriates the children for not even having “the decency to misbehave in French,” declares that there will no school until Omid has glasses again.
“A turkey stole my glasses” is the sort of thing that a kid would come up with only if turkeys were wandering around town, and indeed, this Winnipeg is obsessed with turkeys. Old men in the Tim Hortons teahouse (a Tim Hortons sign rendered in Persian is one of the film’s many sight gags) talk all day about their turkeys, the turkeys they’ve lost, the glory of their beautiful turkeys. Maybe it’s just the unfailingly snowy weather, but everyone seems to be sad about something — there’s a “Kleenex repository” in town to supply tissues to everyone and a resident lacrimologist studying tears at the cemetery, which is situated between a bunch of highways.
Other characters wander through the story, which is shot in a richly textured style meant to mimic the films of the Iranian New Wave — essentially, Winnipeg as Tehran, circa 1970. There’s a tour guide (Pirouz Nemati) who has seemingly ensnared some rare Winnipeg tourists into following him around to see the sites of interest, all of which are fabulously commonplace, like the location of The Great Parallel Parking Incident of 1958, or the UNESCO-designated site where someone left a briefcase at a bus stop and nobody has moved it in years, nor peered into it. “The Forgotten Briefcase and its bench,” the guide tells the group, is “a monument to absolute inter-human solidarity, even at its most basic and banal.”
In another small plot, two girls (Rojina Esmaeili and Saba Vahedyousefi) discover a 500-riel bill (the word seems to be a play on the Iranian currency, called rial) frozen in ice, and they realize this could be the answer to all of their problems: If they could get it out, then they could get glasses for Omid, and school could start again. But first they need an ax. Where will they get an ax?
There’s also a guy named Matthew Rankin, played (you guessed it) by Rankin, who has left his boring bureaucratic job in Montreal. (He assures his geography-challenged superior that “It was by far the most neutral experience of my life.”) He boards a bus bound for Winnipeg, where his mother is ailing; among the bus’s other passengers are both the teacher and a beauty contest-winning turkey. When Rankin gets to Winnipeg, he starts to suspect that the man who answers his mother’s phone might actually have taken over his position as her son.
These seemingly random pieces are actually purposeful: They’re references to an array of films from directors including Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi. “Universal Language” is likely to most please the viewer who has dwelt, so to speak, on one side or the other of the imagined Winnipeg (or both). But when all smushed together into one plot and laced with humor about Canada, they take on a dreamy quality, augmented by sequences (like one with a skater in a sparkly costume) that seem dislocated entirely from time and space. Instead of positing a world where one culture has assimilated into the other, “Universal Language” imagines a world where the two have merged, and now a new cultural identity peacefully exists, a culture in its own right.
By the end of the film, Rankin (the character, though maybe the director too) has learned a lesson about the perils of coming home again — how our identities morph over time. You can’t just pick up a person in one place, drop them down in another, and expect them to be the same. Furthermore, once we leave a place and go to another, we never fully belong there again. It’s a pensive meditation in an era of displacement, even if the film never tries to make a big point. The mood is palpable, and the meditation legible, even if Winnipeg and Iranian cinema are to you as remote as a chilly winter moon.
The post ‘Universal Language’ Review: If Tehran Were Winnipeg appeared first on New York Times.
