Never in a million years would I have thought about crosspollinating the aesthetic feel of an Abbas Kiarostami film with Guy Maddin’s unique proclivities with Canadiana, but Matthew Rankin’s mind seems to know no bounds. What he concocts here is strikingly inventive: a Canada where the official languages are Farsi and French, and a Winnipeg (which is not in Alberta, by the way) wherein Métis hero Louis Riel is on the currency, neighbourhood districts are distinguished by the colour of the buildings’ concrete, wild turkeys are people’s protein of choice, and your run-of-the-mill Tim Hortons is transformed into a Persian teahouse… with a few doughnuts for good measure, of course. It’s in this eccentric setting where Rankin plays out several interconnected plots, carefully revealing character relations bit by bit. From a pair of precocious youngsters taking on a mission to retrieve money frozen in ice to an earmuff-wearing tour guide shuffling his tourists to some decidedly unremarkable points of “interest,” Rankin’s ear for quick and absurd wit hits with aplomb as his characters traverse their environs and comment on their situations with the dryest of deadpans outside of, perhaps, Finland’s Aki Kaurismäki.
In an unusual move, however, it is Rankin’s own appearance in his film as an alternate-reality version of himself that alters the tenor of Universal Language. As a government lackey from Quebec, Rankin-playing-Rankin returns to Winnipeg after a long absence to see his aging mother, and it is in his wanderings around this invented version of Winnipeg that we sense keenly the story’s undercurrents of displacement and struggles for meaningful connection. Rankin is the missing piece of the puzzle, but also, conversely, the puzzle’s maker—an unusual tension that doesn’t ever cleanly resolve itself, but not unsatisfyingly so. To see the creator amidst the artifice of his own making, engaging with it with the most visible immediacy, not only reveals how personal the endeavour is to him, but it brings into relief the sociocultural entrenchment of Canada’s two solitudes, and how they cannot be escaped even in a Canada of idiosyncratic fabrication. And in that entrenchment, Rankin posits, even identity begins to slip away, fissure and even blend together, until the person staring back at you from across a table could have very well lived your life, too.
In other words: Come for the philosophy, stay for the turkeys.
Universal Language had its North American premiere at TIFF in the Centrepiece programme on September 10, 2024.
The Lonely Film Critic 