The second feature film from rising Canadian director Matthew Rankin, following The Twentieth Century, Universal Language is a series of loosely connected, lightly comic vignettes that eventually merge into a deeply moving whole.
Written by Rankin, Pirouz Nemati, and Ila Firouzabadi, Universal Language imagines an alternate Canada where the Persian language is commonplace, alongside English and French. We follow a collection of Persian-speaking characters through various areas of Winnipeg, which is dotted with signage that is also in the language (which is primarily spoken in Iran). There is a pair of school-age sisters (Rojina Esmaeili and Saba Vahedyousefi) attempting to retrieve paper money that has been stuck in ice; a tour guide (Nemati) leading a disgruntled group across the frozen landscape; and a disillusioned bureaucrat (Rankin) who has abruptly left his job in Quebec to reunite with his mother.
From the opening single take observing an exasperated teacher (Mani Soleymanlou) try to calm his rowdy classroom to the shot-reverse-shot conversation—filmed from the far sides of the room—between the bureaucrat and his boss as a colleague sobs in a nearby cubicle, Rankin combines camerawork, blocking, and minimalist performances to create a comedy that is as dry as the surrounding winter air. He’s following in the footsteps of the Swedish comic tableauist Roy Andersson, American independent Jim Jarmusch, snow-globe inventor Wes Anderson, and, of course, Guy Maddin, with whom he shares not only a Winnipeg background but also in inclination to experiment with what a cinematic narrative can be. (In the movie’s climax, memories and identities become porous in a way that is inexplicable, yet magical.)
For all the humor (turkeys are part of a particularly silly recurring motif), the light tone of Universal Language belies a bittersweet consideration of what it means to belong to a family, a city, a country. At a time when the world’s powers seem intent on establishing cruel borders, of both the geographical and psychological kind, the movie adeptly erases the sort of lines that are designed to inflame and exclude.
(7/2/2025)
