How Universal Language Found Poetry in Meaningless Spaces

Matthew Rankin explains the Iranian and Winnipegian influences that shaped his film.

By
Roxana Hadadi,
a Vulture TV critic who also covers film and pop culture.  
She is a juror for the Peabody Awards.

Photo: Maryse Boyce

Spoilers follow for Universal Language, released in theaters February 14 and available for digital rental as of April 8. 

In the movie Universal Language, Winnipeg becomes a sort of alternate-reality version of Tehran. When filmmaker Matthew Rankin and his co-writers, Ila Firouzabadi and Pirouz Nemati, screened their movie in those cities, the Iranians who saw the film thought it had been made just for them and so did the Canadians. That’s the whole point of Universal Language, Rankin admits — to “look at something familiar from an unfamiliar angle and see it again in a new way for the first time.”

“The Winnipeggers said to us, ‘We have never seen a more authentic depiction of our city than this,’ and of course, it’s a movie that’s in Farsi, right? In Tehran, they said the same thing. They were like, ‘This movie belongs to us. It’s as if you made it specifically for us,’ and of course, these are people who don’t know who Tim Horton is,” Rankin says. “Those were the two most rewarding screenings for us: to have an experience of both and to feel this echo.”

Much of Universal Language operates in that remix register with a combination of whimsy and melancholy that taps into both Winnipegian culture and Iranian cinematic traditions: There are posters of Canadian politicians in public places, Iranian food vendors roaming the streets, and Farsi-speaking children struggling to learn French. (Since that December screening in Tehran, the film’s screener leaked and it’s gone “sort of viral” in Iran, Rankin says: “We wanted to make a website where people in Iran could just watch it for free. But they were many steps ahead of us, so now they’re just watching it.”) The film’s production design, art design, and cinematography all create a visual landscape that is often colorful, usually absurd, and always with a foot in both cultures.

The goal, Rankin says, was to make it so that “you can’t necessarily tell what city you’re in. You might be here, you might be there, or you might be in both at the same time.” Here, Rankin explains five of the film’s most meaningful visuals and motifs and breaks down how they’re influenced by Universal Language’s two guiding cultures.

From left: Photo: Oscilloscope LaboratoriesPhoto: Maryse Boyce

From top: Photo: Oscilloscope LaboratoriesPhoto: Maryse Boyce

Winnipeg’s most colorful interior is the Kleenex emporium, where dozens of boxes of Kleenex in a distinctive gold-and-blue dot pattern line the walls. The Iranian community in the film is depicted as loving an opportunity to weep into some facial tissue: A lacrimologist devoted to the study of crying passes out Kleenex at town funerals, and a year’s supply of Kleenex serves as the prize for the town’s Bingo night. 

The presence of Kleenex in the Iranian household is something Ila has always found amusing. One night we were having a dinner party and our friend Negin Abbasi was going around with a box of Kleenex and offering it to people, saying, “Would you like to cry? Do you need to cry?” We named the character of Negin after her and also my friend Louis Negin, who was going to be in the film and unfortunately passed away. We began improvising the idea that this would be someone’s vocation — that they would work in a cemetery and hand out Kleenex and console people. There’s something a little bit sad about it but also something a little bit funny. That’s the space the movie likes to be in the most. Even the cemetery itself — it’s right next to this highway, and that came from my own life. I went to visit my great-grandparents, who are buried in the cemetery outside of Winnipeg. When they died in the 1960s, it was this very bucolic, tranquil field outside of the city. But since then, an enormous freeway has been built next to it, and so their grave is right next to this highway.

The funeral was filmed in a series of very tiny green spaces in the intestines of a freeway in Montreal. There’s these little spaces between very busy roadways that someone filled with grass or maybe shrubs. No human would ever really go there. The movie is full of spaces like that. It’s searching for poetry in these meaningless spaces, which is, of course, part of the absurdism. It’s the contrast of the divine and the banal, the sacred and the profane, the sublime and the ridiculous. Bizarrely, it was one of the easier locations we were able to get. Beige walls were very, very difficult for us to clear. No one would let us shoot against their beige wall. The city said “yes” immediately, I think because no one had ever requested to shoot in one of these places ever before.

We wanted the Kleenex room to look almost like a shoe store, just filled with Kleenex. The design of the box was inspired by the old logo for Windsor salt. Production designer Louisa Schabas’s son manually put those dots on the box. It took him a couple days. He wasn’t completely alone, but he did the lion’s share of it. In the store, the costume designer, Negar Nemati, was really inspired by old photographs of Anoushiravan Rohani. He wrote “Tavalodet Mobarak,” the Iranian birthday song. He’s always dressed in a white tuxedo with frills and a tie. We thought there was something very Kleenex-like about that tuxedo. We dressed our friend Aonan Yang like Anoushiravan Rohani. All of these things, it’s all about amplifying, exaggerating the idea of a Kleenex shop.

From left: Photo: Oscilloscope LaboratoriesPhoto: Maryse Boyce

From top: Photo: Oscilloscope LaboratoriesPhoto: Maryse Boyce

The film follows a pair of sisters, older Nazgol and younger Negin, as they try to find a pair of missing glasses belonging to Negin’s friend Omid. Nazgol spends time in the town’s flower shop, where the florist has hung signs urging customers to “speak softly, flowers are sensitive.” According to Schabas, the florist’s offerings are “mostly made up, using existing fake flowers and changing the stems and leaves to create new ‘invented’ flowers.” Nazgol leaves the store with a potted crocus (the national flower of Manitoba), which eventually makes it into Matthew’s hands as he goes to visit his father’s grave. 

The thing that I really love about the films we’re referencing is how actions are covered. Often the camera really listens, and it has its own subjectivity, and it’s looking for stuff. In the West, we have this way of filming where it’s all about an active protagonist, and wherever the action is, that’s where the camera is focused. That is the classic sort of western shot–reverse shot. But in a lot of these Iranian films, often the camera will focus on the person listening rather than the person speaking, and sometimes the camera will move away from the action and focus on something that is next to the action. Sometimes you won’t even see the most dramatic event in the story — that is left to your imagination. It invites you to have your own relationship with what you’re watching.

We elected to not ever show the flower man (Hamid Shafii). We wanted to keep it on the level of the kids. This was something that cinematographer Isabelle Stachtchenko and I thought about. What does it mean to not see a face, to have a character concealed? To have their facial responses hidden from the viewer? It raises all manner of questions that we’re not typically asking when we watch a film in western cinema.

Photo: Oscilloscope Laboratories

We also wanted to really show the room. Louisa Schabas filled that room with flowers. There’s a lot of chrysanthemums. We did use Close-Up as a reference, actually. At the end of that film, Hossain Sabzian brings to the Ahankhah family a tall plant of flowers, and it’s a wonderful moment. He picks one and then puts it back and chooses another and then gets back on the bike. There’s nothing smooth about it. That type of flower is in the movie.

From left: Photo: Oscilloscope LaboratoriesPhoto: Oscilloscope Laboratories

From top: Photo: Oscilloscope LaboratoriesPhoto: Oscilloscope Laboratories

Universal Language’s external color palette is purposefully drab, with lots of grays, beiges, and browns reflecting Winnipeg’s brutalist architecture in the film. (Various zones in Winnipeg are even named after those colors.) But one figure makes for a vibrant, glorious image: the Christmas-tree man, whose body is a holiday-inspired confection of baubles, tinsel, and lights. Nazgol and Negin are as polite to him as they are to every other adult in the film. 

There’s this wonderful shot in Where Is the Friend’s House? where the kid is looking for directions. He’s running from Koker to Poshteh trying to find the friend’s house, and he runs into this man who’s carrying a lot of lumber. He looks almost like a Jim Henson character: just a pile of branches on legs. That moment is a tribute to that but also to a couple other things. A very important influence for us was a Winnipeg street photographer named John Paskievich, who took all these photos in Winnipeg in the 1970s and 1980s. They’re full of a very compassionate sense of Winnipeg in all its strangeness. He has this one photo of a man walking along the street carrying an enormous pile of rugs, and it’s very much like the image in the Abbas Kiarostami film. Except he’s wearing these really amazing striped pants. Negar Nemati, our costume designer, found almost identical striped pants, and so we’re like, “That’s what the Christmas tree is gonna wear.” Paskievich remarked upon that when we showed it to him. We met Abbas’s son Ahmad Kiarostami in San Francisco, and he remarked upon that part too. Both were really delighted by that.

The third thing is there was a lady on my street when I was growing up who dressed in Christmas ornaments. She would wear tinsel, and she wore a star or sometimes an angel on her head, and she had this boa that was made out of cedar boughs. She was just obsessed with Christmas. She would wish you “Merry Christmas” even if it was August. As a kid, we loved how she was, and it was always such an event to run into her because she was always dressed in this really amazing way. She was around when I was quite young and then she vanished. I don’t know what happened to her. As I’ve grown up, I can imagine perhaps adults in the neighborhood having a more ironic relationship with this lady. But as kids, we didn’t at all. We just loved her personal style. To run into her on the street was not shocking in any way. These kids encounter someone dressed as a tree and do not remark upon that. They’re simply asking for directions. [Laughs.] That was my little tribute to that lady, and also to Winnipeg.

Photo: Oscilloscope Laboratories

As Matthew wanders around Winnipeg, he observes a group of tourists being led by a tour guide named Massoud (Pirouz Nemati). He shows them an abandoned suitcase, left behind on a bus bench years before, which has sat untouched in case its owner ever returns. It’s now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Massoud explains, because the suitcase serves as “a monument to absolute inter-human solidarity, even at its most basic and banal.” The moment is an echo of an earlier scene in the film in which Matthew quits his job in Montreal and abandons his suitcase on his office building’s external staircase. 

That happened to me when I was in Iran. I took a train from Tehran to Kashan, and on the train platform, I forgot a bag. It just had a journal and a book, but I really wanted these things. I caught another train back to Tehran, and something like a good eight hours had passed. But the bag was exactly where I left it on the bench by the platform. It had not been moved. It was incredible. There was something very moving to me about this, that no one had touched it and they just left it there. That story stayed with me and then it found a voice in the movie.

Someone asks what’s in the briefcase during the tour group, and as Pirouz says, “No one has ever looked inside.” As I recall, there was something in it, but whatever it was was kept hidden from Pirouz and myself. I think Louisa Schabas put something in it. I seem to recall asking her what was in it, and she said, “I will never tell you.” And of course, I love benches. I made a movie about bench placement, Municipal Relaxation Module.

From left: Photo: Oscilloscope LaboratoriesPhoto: Maryse Boyce

From top: Photo: Oscilloscope LaboratoriesPhoto: Maryse Boyce

Turkeys play a major role in Universal Language. The film begins with a nod to Kanoon, the Iranian Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young People that was involved in producing many films about Iranian children. Universal Language’s spin on the institute’s goose logo is a turkey illustration by Iranian graphic designer Mohammad Jalali. Two of the movie’s secondary characters are elderly butcher brothers who specialize only in turkeys and who become friends with a special bird online, which then travels to Winnipeg on a commuter bus (next to an older woman who is very unhappy to be seated next to a turkey) and ends up stealing a young boy’s glasses. One of the film’s final shots is of that turkey escaping its fate and joining a rafter of its brethren running wild around Winnipeg, doing whatever they please. 

There’s this wonderful little moment in Close-Up, at the beginning of the film, where a group is trying to find the Ahankhah house. They’re looking for directions, and they stop at this one guy who’s carrying a bunch of turkeys. He gives them some directions and offers them a turkey, and they’re like, “No, no, that’s fine,” and they go off. Something about this guy carrying a whole bushel of turkeys was something Pirouz and I really liked. We wondered, Was that a thing that just happened — there happened to be a guy passing with turkeys? Or if Kiarostami had planted that person and had decided that he should be carrying turkeys. Or did he meet a person who naturally carried turkeys and then set up this encounter? It was just a little detail of that movie that mystified us, that we found very enchanting. There are a few other little seeds for the turkeys.

Photo: Oscilloscope Laboratories

I went to the MacDowell Residency a few years ago, and I met CAConrad, who’s one of my favorite American poets. They’re from Philadelphia, and they told me Ben Franklin wanted the wild turkey to be the national bird of the United States because Ben Franklin believed the bald eagle was a bird of low moral character that robbed from the nests of other birds. Ben Franklin’s whole idea was that with turkeys, you get a solidarity, a community. Turkeys move in packs, and the turkey in the film is, in a lot of ways, carrying some of the film’s optimism. It begins on this solo journey, possibly on a path toward a certain amount of danger. It gets entangled with these kids and their strange story. And then by the end of the movie, the turkey has found his community out there, and they waddle off together on their own little guided tour of Winnipeg.

The other thing that sealed the deal was the word “turkey.” In many languages, it’s a bird we associate with elsewhere. In English, we say turkey, which of course refers to the country of Turkey, but in Turkish, the word for turkey is hindi, which refers to India. Similarly, in French we say dinde, which means de l’Inde, which means “from India.” In Portuguese, the bird comes from the Netherlands. It’s a bird that really transcends all borders and which is native to North America. That was exciting to us, too. And I think Persian is one of the few languages that has its own word for “turkey,” which is buqalamun. The film’s title in Farsi is Avaz e’Buqalamun, which means Song of the Turkey.

We invited our friend Faraz Anoushahpour to be the on-set filmmaker. He spent a lot of time with this turkey wrangler, Michel Fournier. Whenever you see the solo turkey, it’s always the same one. When we filmed on the bus with our friend Hemela Pourafzal, who sits next to the turkey in the film, it was springtime. And Michel said that because it was springtime, there was a chance the turkey might try to mate with Hemela. [Laughs.] You can’t see it in the movie, but there’s plexiglass between Helema and the turkey to discourage any amorous outbursts. But really, I think he delivered a very soulful, very nuanced performance, and we loved working with him. We asked Michel what the turkey’s name was. He said, “He doesn’t have a name; he’s a wild turkey.” So we named him Hormuz.

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How Universal Language Found Poetry in Meaningless Spaces