Best International Film: Canada's "Universal Language"

by Cláudio Alves

In the last hours of voting for the Oscar nominations, let's celebrate one of the best films up for Academy consideration. It's none other than the Canadian submission for Best International Film, Matthew Rankin's sophomore feature – Universal Language. If watching the director's debut, The Twentieth Century, felt like witnessing the second coming of fellow Winnipegger Guy Maddin, seeing the wonder of his latest work is akin to re-encountering Jacques Tati in the 21st century. Or perchance a Manitoban Abbas Kiarostami. Rather than evading such comparisons, Rankin runs straight at them, making his latest project into a dialogue between filmic languages and other idioms along the way, reaching for the fantastical, so specific as to be universal…

Somewhere to the west of Montreal and the east of Tehran, there exists a Winnipeg where Farsi is the common tongue, and Tim Horton's serves Persian tea. The city exists out of time, seemingly connected to contemporary Quebec while inhabiting a liminal space, lost in a Euro-tinged version of the late-20th century. Such is the setting of Matthew Rankin's Universal Language, a dream that's like a conversation between cinematic traditions of different provenance. Supposedly, this transnationalist mélange emerged from a story told by the director's grandmother. Once upon a time, in her childhood, the girl and her brother found a two-dollar bill trapped in ice on a sidewalk in Winnipeg. 

Desperate to retrieve their treasure, the kids went on a mini-odyssey of sorts, searching for any means of getting the money out of its frozen prison. At the end of the day, they trusted a rapacious drifter who took the cash for himself. To Rankin, the story sounded nothing more than the Iranian movies of the 70s through the 90s, where some of the world's craftiest filmmakers evaded state censorship by nestling their societal observations within stories of children, their dilemmas, their adventures, their struggles and joys. Think of Kiarostami's Where is the Friend's House?, Panahi's The Mirror, and countless Makhmalbafs. 

Perchance, like many lovers of the seventh art, Rankin relates to the world, in part, through the films he holds near and dear. It's a familiar phenomenon, that of hearing a story told and imagining it unfold as a collage of celluloid memories. Some might regard Universal Language as an impenetrable bit of cinephile pretension, all references and stylistic pulls, but that couldn't be farther from the truth. These are earnest impulses born out of affection and reverie. And if they're not so in conception, their execution certainly brims with sincere feeling. Every frame exudes adoration for all the art that exists as foundation for a new piece.

And it's not just the Iranian New Wave and kids from the Kanoon Institute. It's Tati, as mentioned above. Well, only if the French master had been raised within the concrete slabs of brutalist architecture, enamored by beige and brown and grey geometries rather than the clash of Old-World tradition with newfangled Modernism. Notice a speck of Akermanian contemplation here, a wink to the Marx Brothers there, the graphic exactitude of mid-century animation rendered as live-action materiality. From all this, Universal Language is born, not as collage or a haphazard zine, but a conversation between artistic visions, disparate ways of seeing the world brought together in harmony. 

These polyphonic unions are only possible through Rankin's surrender to the specificities of his discipline. Pictures like Universal Language aren't strictly indebted to literature, no matter how literary their text might seem, nor painting, even when their compositions look good enough to hang in the Louvre. No, this is pure cinema in celebration of itself, mixing and matching the medium's fundamental mechanisms to create new meanings that can only come to be on the big screen. What is Rankin's Iranian Winnipeg but another in a long list of locations playing impossible versions of themselves for the camera, sometimes other places altogether?

Yet, what strikes me most strongly when assessing Universal Language is how smoothly Matthew Rankin pulls it off, no matter how convoluted his plotting or ideas might seem. There's the story of the two kids with their icey treasure and a parallel plot with their long-suffering teacher, Rankin playing a fictional facsimile of himself and a stranger who becomes his friend, the monotone divagations of a local tour guide, a whole lot of nonsense about turkeys (the film’s Farsi title literally translates to “Songs of the Turkey”), and some Canadian bureaucracy as the cherry on top. The film never feels chaotic or overstuffed, allowing the audience to relish when these threads crisscross or come together as they do at the end. It's funny, too, one of the year's most hilarious motion pictures where the mise-en-scène is an essential part of the jest.

There's no better example than the picture's opening salvo, initially presented in credits as some educational reel. In it, we observe that same beleaguered pedagogue stride into school through the snow, despair in front of his students and just huff unpleasantly all around. For heaven's sake, he has an earring and used to play guitar. He's not like the other authority figures in the kids' lives! Why don't they respect him? They don't even have the decency to misbehave in French, which he's supposed to be teaching. All of this is presented in perfectly timed shots, including a long take at the start that refuses to reduce itself to a human proportion and prefers, instead, to privilege the school building's blocky shapes. 

Every time you think the image is about to cut, it doesn't. And then it does, for there's never any purposeless lingering. It all feels calibrated for maximum comedy, the kind of lark built on rhythmic disruptions, the vibrancy of pools of chaos existing within absolute order. Into the classroom and back out, Rankin used tracking shots to make the children into a mural of simultaneous activity, letting our attention drift across several layers of foreground, middle ground, background funny business. Through it all, he keeps establishing his players' personalities and the bizarre world they inhabit, somehow turning an expository intro into a showcase of formal mastery.

Though, of course, the movies are a collaborative artform. As much as one might want to heap praise on Rankin, his partners in crime deserve just as much love. I was especially impressed by the combined efforts of DP Isabelle Stachtchenko, production designer Louisa Schabas, and editor Xi Feng. Universal Language is full of incredible feats of framing within wondrous locations and stylized décor, displayed by cutting so precise it'll put any surgeon to shame. Images have a heightened quality to them, and the dialogue is certainly funny. But it's the editing that constructs the best jokes. It's the timing, the punctuation, even the scale changes whose full potential is harnessed by Feng like nobody's business. 

Another inspired moment will situate the viewer in a government building, paying witness to the most boring conversation imaginable. Only, despite that description, the thing is riveting. Feng and Rankin cut between two nearly identical shots to make the dialogue hit like a series of little jolts. The incredibly arch presentation makes it all the funnier, another counterpoint to the tedious talk. And there's also the poor sod crying his heart out while the bureaucratic nothingness is discussed on the other side of the room. By the end of the scene, I found myself in stitches, though not necessarily laughing at the characters.

If Universal Language is making comedy gold out of its cast of oddballs, it does so without implying they're comical as people. Indeed, the exercise feels faithful to notions of dignity as an essential part of dry humor. A strategy like this allows for the tonal shifts Rankin drops on its audience partway through the flick's swift 89 minutes. It comes with a surge of dissolves and Iranian music, the murmurings of someone missing their child growing up. And then the gentleness, the talk of a changed Winnipeg and the kiss of the winter sun. A sense of loss so clear yet so inchoate comes to be, a whisper in the wind and a sudden blossom of warmth in one's belly for which there is no explanation. Yet, it manifests as the product of immense stylization and hardcore formalism, an alternative take in humanist filmmaking. It's a cinematic miracle!