Universal Language

Part of my coverage of the 60th Chicago International Film Festival

UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE   ***1/2

Matthew Rankin

2024

IDEA:  In some alternate-reality Winnipeg, two schoolgirls try to help a classmate in crisis while a filmmaker returns from Montreal to visit his mother.

BLURB:  With his first feature, The Twentieth Century (2019), Matthew Rankin drew heavily from the archly archaic stylings and absurdist surrealism of fellow Winnipeg fabulist Guy Maddin. While Maddin remains evident in the DNA of Universal Language, he is joined by a rather less-expected influence: Abbas Kiarostami. Cheekily announcing his homage as a product of the “Winnipeg Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults,” Rankin uncannily transposes Kiarostami’s Iran onto Canada, preserving Farsi as the spoken and written language while refiguring desert roads and villages as snow drifts and beige brutalist architecture. As in many of Kiarostami’s early films, Universal Language is, in part, about the quest of a plucky child (two, in this case) who run into an assortment of variously authoritarian or unsympathetic adults along the way. But the film’s picaresque proves to be more expansive: with each new scenario and character introduced, including a fictionalized version of Rankin himself, the more the film becomes a sardonic portrait of Canadian national identity as something defined by its lack of definition or distinction. Or is it more like polymorphism? Universal Language’s satirical transnationalism and pristinely rectilinear mise en scène - at times broken by languorous pans and dissolves - point up the fundamental constructedness and permeability of any culture. They also hilariously, self-deprecatingly imagine a Canada that is nowhere and everywhere, a frozen yet profoundly liquid land of turnpike monuments, derelict malls, and Kleenex repositories that can ultimately be whatever one wants it to be.