The imagery in “Universal Language” does not particularly subtly reference Wes Anderson.
Photo: iffmh.de
We are lost in this world forever.” An incompetent teacher in Winnipeg, Canada forces his students to read this sentence out loud before locking the entire class in the broom closet.
With his second feature film “Universal Language”, which uses the universally understandable language of humor, Matthew Rankin provides, so to speak, counter-evidence to the sentence quoted at the beginning. Ultimately, there is more that unites us as humans than divides us, so that we can sometimes feel like we are in good hands in a world whose absurdity we largely generate ourselves.
With visible pleasure, Rankin takes the audience into a fictional Winnipeg, which was already staged in a similarly bizarre way by the Canadian auteur Guy Maddin in the pseudo-documentary “My Winnipeg”.
Matthew Rankin describes his film as an “autobiographical hallucination”.
At the beginning of the surreal scenario, which is captured by camerawoman Isabelle Stachtchenk on 16 millimeters and often in magnificent tableaus, the students Negin (Rojina Esmaeili) and Nazgol (Saba Vahedyousefi) do everything they can to get a frozen 500 riyal banknote out of the ice liberate. They want to use it to buy their classmate Omid a new pair of glasses that were stolen from him by one of the many silly turkeys that parade through this film.
This monetary MacGuffin sets the episodic comedy in motion, which always seems to get lost in subplots: In Winnipeg, which is supposedly dominated by brutalist concrete blocks, where everyone speaks Farsi as a matter of course, prefers to drink tea and listen to Persian music, Massoud ( Pirouz Nemati), whom the children later meet, tourists through the snow-covered city.
The tour guide, who is a bit reminiscent of Borat, shows the frozen vacationers completely meaningless places, for example a broken fountain in a shopping center, an ordinary apartment building where no one famous lives, and a rotten briefcase on a bench that someone once left there left behind for years. His tour schedule also includes a cinema that only shows one-dimensional films because the 3D films that were previously shown were too exciting for the audience. You have to like Rankin’s not always subtle humor.
The director, who debuted in 2019 with the even more absurd fake biography “Twentieth Century” about a former prime minister, describes his film as an “autobiographical hallucination” because many scenes were inspired by events from his own life. That’s probably why the experimental filmmaker takes the liberty of letting the residents of Winnipeg speak Persian.
He spent some time in Iran at a young age to learn about Iranian cinema. The films of Jafar Panahi (“White Balloon”) and Abbas Kiarostami (“Close-Up”), characterized by poetic realism, were clearly the inspiration for this human comedy. The director also devotes a few scenes to his great role models, the Marx Brothers. According to his own statement, as an eight-year-old he compulsively dressed up as Groucho Marx and therefore had to endure various therapies.
In a scene that can hardly be surpassed in terms of desolation, but is also quite lengthy and is strongly reminiscent of the melancholy humor of Roy Andersson (“On Infinity”), the director plays the fictional Matthew Rankin, who quits his job in a ministry in Quebec. He tears up all the tents behind him to finally visit his old mother in Winnipeg. However, his bus breaks down, and so he sets off on foot through the snow to look for his mother, who no longer lives in her old home.
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On the odyssey that follows, he will learn a lot about the instability of identity, but also the connectedness of everyone and the goodness of some people. A pharmacist with bad circles under his eyes, who also seems to have stepped out of a Roy Andersson film, reminds him with an expressionless expression when buying sleeping pills that life is worth living.
The exaggeratedly arranged rooms of Wes Anderson also clearly inspired Rankin: in one scene, little Omid goes to see his father, who runs a wonderfully absurdly equipped Kleenex tissue shop. His mother works as a gravedigger and is conveniently able to offer fresh Kleenex cloths to the mourners in the cemetery.
Towards the end, Rankin expertly brings all of these strange plot threads together. Canada’s submission for this year’s Oscars is certainly not for everyone, the humor takes some getting used to, but anyone who gets involved in this breathtakingly photographed masterpiece will feel less lost in the world for 90 minutes. Helpfulness and empathy, humor and poetry and, last but not least, the magic of cinema can ultimately be understood beyond national borders.
“Universal Language”: Canada 2024, directed by Matthew Rankin. With: Rojina Esmaeili, Danielle Fichaud, Sobhan Javadi. 89 minutes, start: 23.1.
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