While ‘Universal Language’ Is Sure To Nettle, Director Matthew Rankin Does Manage To Weave a Spell

Canada’s submission to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences for the 2024 Best International Feature was Matthew Rankin’s “Universal Language.” Good luck getting into the heads of a Hollywood elite in terms of divining the selection procedure: However keen the academy is set on proving its political correctness bona fides, the bottom line still provides an abiding rule of thumb. Mr. Rankin’s picture about identity and displacement flicks the first switch, but a whimsical art house confection is unlikely to flood anyone’s coffers in terms of box office. The Academy didn’t pick up Mr. Rankin’s ball.History has proven that neither Oscars nor huge profit margins have proven reliable markers of quality. Even as a meditation on assimilation and nationalism, “Universal Language” is likely to nettle: It’s too mercurial a venture, too idiosyncratic and indeterminate. Audience members with whom I attended a screening were puzzled. Just how accurate was its reflection of the Persian population of Winnipeg and Montréal? Immigration and its influence on the polity has been on the international mindset for a few years now.Not everyone is privy to the press materials accompanying a film, but the verbiage surrounding “Universal Language” confirms what the picture insinuates: Affectation, not realism, is the rule. In an interview with himself — yes, himself — Mr. Rankin asks: “How do you explain this strange thing you made?” The director responds that it is “a crazy duck-billed platypus of a movie: one part lonesome Québécois cinéma gris, one part surreal Winnipeg puzzle film, one part Kanoon-style Iranian poetic realism.”“Kanoon” refers to a variety of entertainments produced under the banner of the Institute for the Intellectual Development for Children and Young Adults, an organization founded in Iran and blessed by the then queen, Farah Diba. Rojina Esmailli in ‘Universal Language.’ Via Oscilloscope LaboratoriesMr. Rankin also mentions as inspiration Abbas Kiarostami’s “Where Is The Friend’s House” (1987) and Jafer Panahi’s “The White Balloon” (1995), two films centered on a child’s frame of mind. How does Mr. Rankin’s home country figure into his aesthetic? “Iranian cinema emerges out of 1,000 years of poetry while Canadian cinema emerges out of 40 years of discount furniture commercials.” So much for the hometown team.The city elders of Winnipeg and Montréal won’t be employing “Universal Language” as an enticement for tourism, that’s for sure. Canada is pictured as a series of anodyne institutional behemoths and urban dead zones, a concrete landscape that towers over its citizens when it isn’t shunting them into drably lit interiors. Mr. Rankin shuttles his characters in, out, and through these settings as if they were figurines in a doll house designed by a Surrealist painter, Giorgio de Chirico.Several storylines criss-, cross, and meander through Mr. Rankin’s movie, but first we have to buy into his primary conceit: that the two main languages of Canada are French and Farsi. It’s an odd choice whose rationale isn’t entirely borne out by either the director or screenwriter Pirouz Nemati. “Universal Language” begins with a cinematic stutter redolent of a 1960s public school filmstrip, announcing that what we are about to see was done in “the name of friendship.”“I do art,” Mr. Rankin writes, “because I long for connection with others.” Yet how true is the connection when artifice is one’s metier, especially when the script hunkers down on characters who are of less import than the machinations of a squirrellier-than-thou script?Mani Soleymanlou is hilarious as an elementary school teacher frustrated by his charges. Omid (Sobhan Javadi) is another endearing figure, a chubby kid with a down-at-the-heels demeanor whose glasses have been stolen.Who stole Omid’s glasses? A turkey, albeit through circumstances that are more arch than funny, and so it goes with the majority of film’s shenanigans. There’s a store that sells nothing but Kleenex. Elsewhere, a group of elderly sages prove to have a knowledge of wild fowl that borders on mania, and then there’s the guy who skulks round the city dressed as a Christmas tree.We’re in territory that bears the influence of Wes Anderson’s oxygen-free absurdism and the studied mannerism of Jacques Tati. But sometimes a body pines for a movie that doesn’t wear its IQ on its sleeve.That “Universal Language” manages to weave its own kind of spell points to a filmmaker of indisputable talents. Let’s hope Mr. Rankin is able to maneuver them into forms that achieve the connectivity he’s so eager to realize.

While ‘Universal Language’ Is Sure To Nettle, Director Matthew Rankin Does Manage To Weave a Spell

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