By Yun-hua Chen.
Universal Language mocks our limited imagination by opening up its limitless possibilities….”
“Cinematic Venn diagramme between Winnipeg, Tehran and Montréal”, or “a Hawaiian pizza”, as director Matthew Rankin described his sophomore feature Universal Language (2024) himself – the film is completely unexpected, bold, free-flowingly imaginative, multi-everything and unconstrained in style.
Following his debut The Twentieth Century (2019), which won the Fipresci Award at the Berlinale, Matthew Rankin maintains his fantasy-driven satire and strong interest in revisiting film history. If The Twentieth Century is a tribute and reworking of German expressionism, Méliès and classical Hollywood cinema, as well as a unique blend of theatrical performance styles, melodramas and Guy Maddin-styled aesthetics, all filmed on 16mm and Super 8, Universal Language explores a more recent part of film history: Iranian New Waves, road movies, political satire, and more. Though Universal Language carries a very different appearance compared to The Twentieth Century, what remains as auteurist is Matthew Rankin’s edginess, craziness, and free-spiritedly imagination as ever – surreal yet grounded in reality, all the while being interchangeably brutal and comical.
Premiered at Quinzaine des Cinéastes in Cannes, Universal Language was produced in Canada and features dialogue in Farsi, French and English. The film begins with a static shot observing an elementary school classroom from outside, with the sound from inside the classroom magnified. Snow covers the ground, creating a completely white landscape. A grade-schooler enters the frame, late for school, and makes his way into the main entrance and then the classroom being observed. This initial setup gives the impression that it might just be another Iranian film, potentially akin to a sweet children’s perspective like Where is My Friend’s Home (1987) or a portrayal of harsh socioeconomic realities like Blackboard (2000).
Yet it is neither. Universal Language then takes a brisk turn of tone when the teacher starts scolding the entire class, whose mother tongue is Farsi, in French, and insults the child who claims that his properly prescribed glasses are stolen by a turkey. This turkey, a special breed apparently, then travels on a long-distance coach, occupying its own seat. The teacher also boards the same coach, sitting next to an ex-bureaucrat from a Québecois government office who takes sleeping pills before the journey and remains asleep even when the coach breaks down. Meanwhile, tour guide Massoud takes a group of tourists to the most anti-tourism locations in Winnipeg. Throughout all this, Farsi is spoken and signposted everywhere in Canada. This convoluted mix of timelines, characterizations, spatial identities, and languages creates a meeting point between jarring elements – a pell-mell of confusion, questions, self-doubt, and self-inquisition.
Arguably the most playful and cinephilic contemporary young filmmaker, Matthew Rankin incorporates profound cinematic references yet refuses to take himself too seriously. It’s almost as if he is making fun of the audience who tries to decipher the coded language of the film and the seemingly illogical temporal and spatial connections when, in the end, the codes can be deciphered in multiple ways or not at all, in equal measures.
It is hard to say whether Universal Language feels more like surrealism à la Buñuel, a sociopolitical allegory, or simply a hijacked flight constantly being re-routed. Its reversal of the relative roles of English and Persian is not a literal one-to-one kind of reversal, but rather something much more playful and maverick. It confidently rejects narrative continuity and classical characterization. The roles of two actors can be reversed in a subsequent scene and still make sense, and the thread of storytelling flows from children discovering a bill frozen in the lake to the tourist group’s most offbeat routes along bland walls and in a dreary governmental building. In the fantastical setting of Canada, the universal language can be comfortably Persian, space doesn’t need to be continuous, time doesn’t need to be linear, and identities don’t need to be consistent. It is truly everything everywhere, maybe not at the same time; director Matthew Rankin believes in a collective creation process, giving his crew and cast space to develop their own ideas.
In a slightly cheeky manner, Universal Language mocks our limited imagination by opening up its limitless possibilities – a brand new way of creating a canvas where the audience is empowered to draw, a hallucination that comes true, some unsolicited stream of consciousness, and a tribute to the director’s multiple weird versions of himself. It breaks down borders, defies conventional expectations, and challenges what is taken from granted: perceived value of here and there, and notions of superiority and inferiority.
Yun-hua Chen is an independent film scholar. Her work has been published in Film International, Journal of Chinese Cinema, and Directory of World Cinema. Her monograph on mosaic space and mosaic auteurs was published by Neofelis Verlag, and contributed to the edited volume titled Greek Film Noir (Edinburgh University Press).