Toronto Hidden Gem: ‘Universal Language’ Is An Absurdist Homage to Iranian Cinema Via Winnipeg

Matthew Rankin’s second feature, Universal Language, certainly echoes the comic sensibility of fellow Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin (The Saddest Music in the World, Rumours). But its fantastical and multilayered structure — intended to pay homage to the Iranian cinema he loves — is difficult to explain. 

Asked to describe what Universal Language is about, Rankin channels his inner Groucho: “It’s about 89 minutes.”

Putting his auteur hat back on, the Montreal-based director adds: “I would describe it as an autobiographical hallucination. It is about my city, but it also isn’t. It’s about Iranian cinema, but it also is not.” 

Iranian filmmakers, known for breaking the boundary between realism and surrealism, not least to elude censors and an oppressive Iranian regime, are a perfect model for Rankin to follow with his own compulsive illusion-making.

The rhythm and structure of Universal Language — where Persian and French are a reimagined as Canada’s two official languages — is very much dictated by Rankin’s sense of Tehran by way of his native Winnipeg. Here he alludes to a Venn diagram, where overlapping circles reveal a relationship between two or more items.

“It isn’t about Iran. It isn’t about Tehran, but it also is,” Rankin adds, with the same surreal overlaps holding true for Winnipeg and Montreal in the satirical comedy. 

An example of Rankin’s cinematic mashup is how he reimagines a Tim Hortons, the coffee and donuts chain considered the ultimate in Canada, in Universal Language as an Arabic tea lounge. Besides its Farsi-language signage, Rankin’s Timmie’s location has samovars, tiny tea glasses and a young woman clutching a sugar cube between her teeth as she sips the tea and the sugar melts.

But, of course, it is Tim Hortons. So Rankin’s nod to Persian cinema includes a diorama on the wall depicting the life and tragic death of NHL legend Tim Horton. “And they’re hoisting a Stanley samovar,” or a Stanley Cup in the shape of a giant samovar, he adds. 

Elsewhere in Universal Language, which is debuting at the Toronto International Film Festival, chickens make tracks in snow during a Canadian winter, two students try to fish a 500-rial bill from frozen ice and Rankin’s hometown of Winnipeg is turned into an otherwise drab cross-cultural hybrid. Rankin himself plays a Farsi-speaking Montreal bureaucrat who returns to Winnipeg to see his mother, only to find his family altered beyond recognition.

“These are spaces that are perhaps on one level quite apart from each other, but in the world of this movie, they’ve been mixed together into this unusual hybrid,” Rankin explains. 

His film, which picked up the first-ever audience award in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight this year, had Rankin casting local Farsi speakers from the Iranian-Canadian community, most of whom are first-time actors with their own Persian comic sensibility.

“When they tell a story, they have a sense of timing, a sense of humor, a sense of drama. So if you write a part you know they can do, that’s aligned to their personality, then they can be really great. You’re setting them up for success,” Rankin explains.

Universal Language will have its North American premiere on Tuesday, Sept. 10 at Bell Lightbox.