In Universal Language, director Matthew Rankin transforms the environs of his native Winnipeg into a tight-knit Iranian hamlet. Advertisements and street signs appear in Persian script, and Farsi is the primary language spoken (although the government of Québec, nearby in the topsy-turvy geography of the film, still sternly insists on French). Townsfolk hawk wares from makeshift stalls set against Brutalist municipal blocks. Flocks of wild turkeys wander snowy streets. In one truly resplendent moment, glazed donuts mingle with brass samovars and beaded tablecloths at a candlelit Tim Horton’s (a doughnut chain started in Canada), tended to by a politely arch proprietress who seems straight out of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s beloved 1999 film The Wind Will Carry Us.
No explanation is offered for this surreal backdrop, and it’s just one of the many quirks in Rankin’s world — including a mall atrium in which no one is allowed to stand for more than 10 seconds, and a forgotten briefcase left untouched for so long that it’s begun growing moss — from which several interconnected storylines slowly take form.
But the argot of the film is more than just a punchline. Farsi shapes Universal Language, imbuing it with a tone of deadpan earnestness that’s gamely shared among the large cast of mostly nonprofessional Iranian-Canadian actors. The Persian community of Rankin’s Winnipeg-Tehran hybrid is built like a closed circuit of mutual dependence and trust, and viewers will inevitably find themselves, to some degree, on the outside looking in.
Universal Language begins at an elementary school, where a strict and punishing instructor is teaching a French class. When one boy can’t see the board well enough to read a passage, the teacher threatens to dismiss class indefinitely until he is able to do so, setting off a series of incidents as two sympathetic classmates strive to solve the problem and set off a chain reaction of community concern, rarely explaining their motivations to adults.
Rankin has insisted in interviews that his film is not political, which likely helped it reach theaters at a moment when distributors are notably wary of “controversial” projects. But Universal Language is so intent upon its worldbuilding that, sooner or later, the more profound implications take hold. Seeing familiar placenames in an ostensibly unfamiliar script is a reliably good gag, but it’s hard to forget that some White North Americans have long considered such realities an assault on their way of life. Like the United States, Canada is currently in the throes of Islamophobic violence and a conservative backlash that is blatantly xenophobic at its core. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently resigned after a wave of dissent, partially attributable to a housing affordability crisis many Canadians see as the result of over-lenient immigration.
Universal Language’s commentary on the psychic frailty of White Westerners today is telling — and vulnerably self-implicating on the part of its director. Rankin himself plays a minor character in the film, one of very few who is clearly of non-Iranian ancestry, though he speaks fluent Farsi just like everyone else. He’s the outsider in the movie, arriving belatedly by bus from Montréal, where he spent the past year producing Francophile government propaganda. Back in the city where he was born, Rankin’s character wanders aimlessly in search of his mother. He eventually finds her living with a young Iranian family whose patriarch, Massoud (co-writer Pirouz Nemati), seems like Matthew’s Persian doppelgänger. This metaphorical replacement becomes literal in the climax of the film when the two men switch bodies. Outsider becomes insider, and vice versa. After the switch, the characters recognize each other for the first time, not as competitive adversaries but as codependent equals.
Though I don’t blame Rankin for his tight-lipped approach, it feels important to call Universal Language what it is: an absurdist comedy about the Great Replacement Theory. The white nationalist conspiracy has lately leaped from the depths of the internet straight into the Trump White House.
In Universal Language, Rankin wryly depicts the total realization of this racist fear, to glorious effect. Far from a fracturing of Canadian society, his film renders its Winipeggers more mutually invested in one another’s lives than any modern Western city could be. With a whole community coming together — knowingly or not, through the daisy chain of favors — to help buy a struggling student a new pair of glasses, and reunite a lost son, it’s a joyous depiction of emphatically unalienated people. Perhaps the universal language to which the title refers is neither Farsi nor French, but the acts of attentiveness and care we are clearly capable of showing one another, yet rarely afford to those we consider strangers.
Universal Language (2024), directed by Matthew Rankin, is now screening in theaters.
