A child dresses as Groucho Marx for school while his classmate, an aspiring donkey breeder, leads one around at recess. A tour guide regales people with the uninteresting tale of a briefcase left on a bench decades earlier. Another man mourns his wife who was flattened by a steamroller.
Almost all of this transpires in a version of Winnipeg, Ontario where the city is largely populated by Farsi-speaking Iranians, who are natives, not immigrants, and all of the signage is in Farsi.
While these oddities may sound like something cooked up by David Lynch, director Matthew Rankin’s world in “Universal Language” is built on a striving for community and friendship. The hard-to-describe movie is absurd and surreal but also sweet and sincere.
Using real stories from Rankin’s life, he and his Iranian co-writers Ila Firouzabad and Pirouz Nemati create a world that’s really strange and yet somehow relatable, like the moment the character named Matthew Rankin (played by the director) visits his childhood home and is welcomed by the strangers living there.
Conversations with Rankin about the world he has created are thoughtful and intellectually stimulating about film and society but the movie itself is also frequently laugh-out-loud funny.
“When I talk about the film, I do end up talking about its mechanisms and philosophy and our idealism and how we made it,” he said in a video interview. “But the film isn’t a treatise on those ideas. And yes, it is very silly.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. You were previously an academic historian and you’ve talked about the idea of putting reality into another form. How did that play out in this movie?
The bare bones of the story were almost like diary entries but the idea was to put my story and the city I grew up in through the prism of cinema so they become something else. When you put something familiar through an unfamiliar prism, it can put things into relief. We wanted people to look at the world in a new way, to be defiant of the containers we create to organize the world and understand it.
We were working from a position of no borders and mutual dependence and a broader, deeper notion of human belonging than our current politics typically allow. That involves a certain amount of stepping outside of ourselves.
Q. It feels like a prism refracted through a fun house mirror. Why such absurdity in a film about human connection?
Film has historically leaned towards simulacrum but it’s always a cheat. Often, the more authentic a movie feels, the more skillful the deceit – it’s in the way we edit or use sound. Films have a continuity person on set.
I believe there’s an opportunity in embracing the artifice and that has expressive potential we haven’t explored. Typically, we are avoiding these things. There are rules about filming – shot then reverse shot and not breaking the axis. If we don’t obey those rules, we see the cheat, and we are reminded that we’re watching a movie and that this isn’t reality. But embracing that artifice lets us explore its expressive potential. That’s also very much a preoccupation of many of the Iranian poetic films that our movie references.
Before photography, the purpose of painting was to create reality perfectly. Once the photograph came along and could do that better, painters were liberated to explore the art’s expressive power. We’re at that point in film history if we choose to accept it.
Q. You play someone named Matthew Rankin, whose father has died and whose mother is fading. And the film’s cast is populated by co-writers, friends and family. Does that ground the film in reality or heighten the the artifice?
I think it exposes the artifice but also makes it more sincere. There’s something about acknowledging the fakery that lets us go further. There’s an interplay between the real world and this invented world, which creates this inter-zone, which isn’t this space or that space. It’s somewhere in between.
The film is set in Winnipeg but everyone speaks in Farsi, which is surreal but for me and my co-writers it’s a sincere expression of our lives. Typically we have separate containers for all of this information, and putting them together is unusual. But Pirouz and Ila are family and our connection is there even though we come from a long way away from each other. There are these points on the compass where we intersect and become part of the same story and care about each other. That space is not here or there, it’s in between so the surrealism of the movie is very much an expression of the fluid nature of the reality of being together.
Q. In this era of bullying politics and social media-driven isolation, the film feels oddly radical or subversive by focusing on trust and community and connection – there’s a hug between strangers that you hold for so, so long. Were you conscious of the film feeling almost political as you made it?
We didn’t think of this as a political movie at all, but in our current politics, it is something of a radical gesture, even a subversive one to simply make a very humble, kind-hearted, gentle movie.
We were just following ideas that thrilled our soul, but of course, we are aware of what world we live in. We all need solitude and space to do our own thing. But too much leads to lonesomeness, which leads to contempt and reflexive opposition and Berlin Walls and online trolling. Since the pandemic, we’ve seen how this has metastasized into something utterly pathological. We now live in a world of increasingly rigid and cruel binaries and there’s a lot about our current politics to encourage people in their isolation and in their contempt.
But I do feel that while people feel hopeless or frightened they don’t see themselves in those containers at all. This film creates a gentle proximity between spaces that we normally imagine are an enormous and perhaps even irreconcilable distance apart. So there’s a relief to the idea that our lives as we live them in our day-to-day are still overwhelmingly very fluid, that there are spaces in which we’re part of a common story.
We’re all alive at the same time and this complex ecosystem is completely improbable and utterly miraculous and beautiful and it’s even absurd. We have survived however many millennia as humans because we do have a capacity to share. That was the spirit in which we made this movie, and it’s a space that I feel is really lacking in our current politics.
We have to find some ways to create these zones where we can collaborate and have a few laughs, to embrace each other and protect each other and listen to each other.