Universal Language could easily have overdosed on twee. Set in an alternate-universe Winnipeg where almost everyone is ethnically Iranian and speaks Farsi, it pays homage to films like Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s Home? and Jafar Panahi’s Offside. Director Matthew Rankin himself plays a character sharing his name, who travels home from Montreal to Winnipeg following news of his mother’s sickness. His story intersects with two subplots: children Negin (Rojina Esmaeili) and Nazgol (Saba Vahedyousefi) find a 500-riel note buried under ice and look for an axe so they can chop it out while Massoud (co-writer Pirouz Nemati) leads a guided tour of Winnipeg parking lots and highways.
Although Universal Language is very witty, with TV-commercial parodies and absurdist touches, fundamentally it’s a deeply sad film. This is reflected in its look: during the dead of winter, Massoud leads tourists around Winnipeg’s beige and grey districts. Matthew’s told to enjoy the relaxing view of a highway outside a Tim Horton’s. Rankin has fun imagining Canada blended with Iran, but that imagination is also used to flesh out his character’s sadder tendencies. With a sense of humor closer to Aki Kaurismaki and Roy Andersson than Panahi, it dreams up a liminal space that could only exist in fiction.
Ahead of the film’s U.S. release beginning this Friday, I spoke with Rankin and actor / co-writer Ila Firouzabadi last month during their trip to New York.
The Film Stage: I was wondering how both of you were introduced to Iranian film.
Matthew Rankin: I was introduced by a friend of mine; her family was Iranian. When I was a teenager she took me to see Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s House? That was the first Iranian film I’d ever seen and it thrilled my soul. So that’s where it began for me.
Ila Firouzabadi: I was born and raised in Iran, so I watched Iranian movies. Taste of Cherry was the one that made the biggest impression. I lived there ’til I was 24; then I came to France, followed by Montreal.
There are a lot of Canadian in-jokes in Universal Language, like the bureaucrat who says Alberta is the capital of Winnipeg. I’m sure there are things I didn’t pick up on at all, not being Canadian. As you’ve traveled around the world with it, how have people connected to that aspect?
Rankin: No one has had trouble with it. A joy of watching a movie is being in a world that’s precisely defined. I saw a lot of movies set in Brooklyn when I was growing up, but I never visited it. Without having any encounters with it, I learned a lot by watching movies. There’s always a joke about New Jersey in movies set in New York. Growing up in Winnipeg, that sort of went over my head, but I understood what it was: New Jersey is an object of condescension for New Yorkers. When I watched them in New York, the Jersey jokes got a huge laugh. They didn’t entirely register for me, but the New Yorkers ate it up. I understood why they exist then.
That’s true of every movie. As a Western viewer, you might not have access to every detail of a Kiarostami film, but you can still be in its world. This movie is very much a hybrid film: it’s interweaving codes of Iranian and Canadian cinema and turning them into a third space, which is something else. The references don’t always go together. That’s the pleasure of the movie––it’s not trying to represent the real world, but creating a new one.
Twentieth Century actually seemed much less accessible to me.
Rankin: I think that also comes down to how much interest someone might have in watching a movie on a Canadian subject. And that might be nobody!
Universal Language team at 62nd New York Film Festival. Photo by Mettie Ostrowski.
When I meet Canadians, they’re rarely enthusiastic about Canadian film. There’s a tendency, especially among Canadians who live in New York, to say “Telefilm Canada is wasting money on films no one will see,” and not value their uniqueness.
Rankin: Are you asking me to jump on that bandwagon?
Again, have you noticed that touring with the film?
Rankin: Particularly since the pandemic, we’re now in an age where public institutions are coming to a close. Individualism has become pathological. There’s a real consumerist notion that’s taken over. Why should I pay for your chemotherapy? I don’t have cancer––that’s your problem! Why should I pay for your national art or experimental animation? I don’t want it! Institutions have collapsed; it’s becoming every man for himself. They’re doing their best to hold down to the fort, but they’re pleasing nobody by becoming risk-averse and trying to please everybody.
It makes the situation worse. They’re between a rock and a hard place. The world is not intended for filmmaking. With or without public money, it’s always a struggle. Ila and I have made films with various sources of money, and we’ll continue to do so. It’s a tricky time, particularly in English-speaking Canada.
Have you faced criticisms that the film is appropriating or exoticizing Iranian culture?
Rankin: No. It was made by a community, including Iranians. There are some people who believe that everything should be made in solitude and the world would work better if we were all sealed into plastic containers. There are transgressions––films by western directors who’ve told the stories of Iranians over the voices of actual Iranians. They’re insulting or just lacking in nuance. But that isn’t the movie we were making at all. The story comes from my own life, but I’m not telling it by myself. It originated with my grandmother finding a two-dollar bill under the ice in Winnipeg during the Great Depression and how that resonated with Kanoon-style films for children.
The idea of making it in Farsi was very exciting. We don’t always ask why we make films in English. I’ve always seen value to resisting the dominance of the English language. The film is Winnipeg surrealism combined with the poetry of Iranian neo-realists. It’s not trying to assign meaning to Iran, or even to Canada; it’s about finding a third space we can encounter. I think there’s real value to that. There’s also a value to solitude. We live in Quebec, which is its world capital, but cinema is profoundly a collaborative medium.
Firouzabadi: In this case, Matthew was very open to the ideas of all the actors and crew members who worked on the film. Of course, he was directing it, but he listened to other people’s ideas. Even if they didn’t exactly match the dialogue, we were completely open to that if they changed it to suit their tone or accent. Being this open can be very rare. We didn’t make something that began with a closed structure; we made it with an open mind and heart.
Rankin: I think you see that in the movie itself. I understand why people would approach a movie like this with skepticism. Honestly, there isn’t really another movie like this. We don’t think of it as an Iranian movie at all, but it is in Farsi. It’s inspired by Iranian cinema. Overwhelmingly, people who’ve seen it understand what it is. We showed it in Tehran just the other week. Their proximity to Canadian in-jokes is even less than yours, but they really felt it. Similarly, Canadians who have little proximity to Iranian life feel it just as much. It’s about building closeness between spaces where we might imagine great distance.
While writing the script, did you have an explanation in your head for how this hybrid city came to be? Did you think it was best just to present it as something that exists and doesn’t need to be explained?
Rankin: If you watch it closely, you’ll see it takes place in the recent past, around 2022 or 2023. It’s a hybrid filled with little elements of Winnipeg history and aspects of my own life. It’s about my parents. It’s prismatic, looking for the Winnipeg within Tehran and vice versa. The idea is not to explain a parallel history; we think of it more as a parallel geography.
How much location scouting did you do to find color-coded buildings for the Beige Zone or the Gray Zone?
Rankin: I did all of it with the director of photography and production designer. We drove around Winnipeg a lot. I knew and loved many. We thought a lot about beige, as though it were a tuning fork.
Firouzabadi: The first time I came to Winnipeg I said to Matthew, “This looks very similar to Tehran, with all the old buildings.” They are beige and brutalist. I saw a similarity between the look of the two cities. He had the same feeling when he first went to Tehran twenty years ago.
The film seems steeped in depression. The way you film Winnipeg, the city becomes a part of that. How much artifice is there to it? For instance, did you repaint any buildings?
Rankin: No, they’re all like that. People read it in different ways. There’s a coldness and emptiness to some of the movie, but it’s also fairly warm and gentle. I love brutalism. To me it’s very beautiful, but not everybody sees it that way. It lends itself to deadpan humor. It connects different points of the compass. There’s great solitude, but deep community. There’s distance but also proximity in the way we shot it.
There’s an artifice to your early films, both Twentieth Century and some shorts, but Universal Language is slower and gives the viewer more space. The earlier films are more dense. Did you think about the two features’ differences?
Rankin: Every time we make a film it’s a reaction against the one I just made. Part of my personal ambition with this movie was to make something more minimalist, but I don’t think that’s what it is. It’s slower paced and doesn’t cut as much, but it has a lot of events and detail. It’s more Jacques Tati than Abel Gance. It’s quieter and gentler than Twentieth Century, but it’s abstract and that brings a certain density.
Firouzabadi: Some parts are very dreamy, like the section at the skating rink. That cuts down the density. Even when we were shooting it in cold weather, we felt that. There are so many things going on. That’s the beauty of it.
There seems to be an impulse to mythologize Winnipeg––obviously in Guy Maddin’s films, but also some of yours and other directors. No one mythologizes Toronto. Where do you think that comes from?
Rankin: It comes from Winnipeg history. There’s a strain which has always been very punk rock and resisted the North American mainstream. I’d trace that to Louis Riel, the metis leader. He was the only indigenous leader who founded a Canadian province, fighting against the government. I’d trace that to the 1919 general strike, where workers took on aristocrats. Yes, I’d trace it to Guy Maddin, the Winnipeg Film Group, Propagandhi, and the Royal Art Lodge. There’s an impulse to resist the mainstream and build something original and defiant.
But it’s coexisted with the opposite impulse: Winnipeg is the greatest producer of Christmas movies for the Hallmark Channel. There’s an impulse which desperately wants to integrate with the mainstream. Those people don’t see any value in Winnipeg as an idea; they just see methods of economic growth, which is the obsession of most North American cities. You don’t find the impulse of resistance in Toronto, which wants to join the North American mainstream.
Was it always your idea to act in the film and play an alter ego based on yourself?
Rankin: I played around with the idea of casting an actor to play myself. Ila and Pirouz were really insistent that the film would lose its meaning if I did that. It plays with cinematic language and the fact that it’s always a cheat––it’s always a city playing a city and a person playing a person, even if they’re playing themselves. For instance, Ila plays a bus driver. She even has a name tag that says “Ila.” Of course, a cinematic image has an artificial relationship to reality. It’s a two-dimensional image of us. That’s something which preoccupied a lot of Iranian filmmakers who influenced us.
Is your next film planned?
Firouzabadi: We started a movie about Esperanto, a docu-fiction. Esperanto speakers hold a world congress every year. Two years ago they held it in Montreal, so we shot it. We haven’t finished it yet, but we will do soon.
Universal Language 2!
Rankin: There are connections. It may be a trilogy eventually.
Universal Language opens on Friday, February 14.