Sunday 25 May 2025, 3:30 pm
Rainbow Cinemas, Northumberland Mall
Synopsis
Winter. Somewhere between Tehran and Winnipeg. Negin and Nazgol find a large sum of money frozen deep within the sidewalk ice and try to find a way to get it out. Massoud leads a group of befuddled tourists upon an increasingly-absurd walking tour of Winnipeg monuments and historic sites. Matthew leaves his job at the Quebec government and embarks upon a mysterious journey to visit his estranged mother. Time, geography and identities crossfade, interweave and collide into a surreal comedy of misdirection.
Structured like a Venn diagram — at the point of confluence between Jacques Tati and Abbas Kiarostami's The Koker Trilogy — Universal Language is at once a diary film, an absurdist city symphony and a welling-up of confinement-era emotion exploring the mysterious interzone where one person ends and the rest of the world begins. An elusive, half-remembered dream of home, solitude, our responsibilities to others and the wild turkeys that haunt us.
Director: Matthew Rankin
Cast: Rojina Esmaeili, Saba Vahedyousefi, Sobhan Javadi, Pirouz Nemati, Mani Soleymanlou, Danielle Fichaud, Matthew Rankin
Genre: Surreal absurdist Comedy
Languages: Persian, French
Run time: 89 min
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
The indie Canadian director Matthew Rankin ("The Twentieth Century") co-writes with Ila Firouzabadi and Pirouz Nemati this absurdist satirical comedy. It features an Iranian cast and a fair amount of strange visuals and odd takes (a store that only sells Kleenex). The genial film has cult film potential. It's basically a story of Iranian immigrants assimilating into the Western culture while being a heavy influence on the Canadian French and English culture.
In Winnipeg, the female school classmates Negin (Rojina Esmaeili) and Nazgol (Saba Vahedyousefi) discover a 500 Riel banknote frozen in the ice. "We can buy so many socks!" exclaims Nazgol. So they borrow an ax from the nearby turkey dealer to remove it from the ice.
Rankin attempts to weave a single tale into three stories that blend together.
The first follows the above named children trying to dig a frozen bill out of the snow. The second follows Rankin himself playing a character who attempts to regain a connection to his hometown by leaving his office job in Montreal for Winnipeg, to be with his mother. Finally, in the third story, a tour guide (Pirouz Nemati, the screenwriter), in Winnipeg, wanders through the snow and abandoned malls with an irritated group of tourists.
It works as a pleasing comedy, showing Canada as a diverse country (though if funnier would have been better).
It played at the Cannes Film Festival.