NATHAN WEINBENDER:
Universal Language imagines an alternate version of Winnipeg where Canadian culture coexists with Iranian culture, where there are Tim Hortons everywhere but the signs are in Farsi and black tea is brewing next to trays of donuts.
This is a strange, absurd, deadpan comedy, set in a town that is so cold, slushy and overcast that the neighborhoods have been deemed the Grey District and the Beige District. There are open-air markets selling old typewriters next to chainsaw emporiums, and the local butcher shop specializes in wild turkey, a species that runs roughshod over everyone. This Winnipeg has some national monuments, but they’re surrounded by criss-crossing freeways.
The movie’s structure is as difficult to describe as its sensibility. We’re introduced to two young sisters as they discover cash frozen under a layer of ice, and they go on a mission to melt it. There’s also a government worker (the film’s director, Matthew Rankin) making a journey by bus from Manitoba to Winnipeg to visit his estranged mother. And then there’s a tour guide (co-screenwriter Pirouz Nemati) who takes his groups to locations that are hilariously unremarkable. Somehow, these pieces come together, though not in the order we expect.
There are many scenes that feel like non sequiturs. In the classroom of a so-called French immersion school, the teacher expels all his students until one of them is able to see the blackboard. Problem is, a wild turkey ran off with the kid’s glasses. Two workers in a federal embassy carry on a conversation while their colleague sobs uncontrollably in the next cubicle. There’s another woman who can’t stop crying, and so the townspeople play bingo to win her a lifetime supply of Kleenex.
As for that tour of Winnipeg, some of the stops include an apartment building where no one notable has lived, but where lots of nice, everyday people have; a briefcase that has been left on a bench so long that plants are growing out of it; and a shopping mall fountain that no longer works. (Why pay attention to a broken fountain? one of the tour members asks. Because there’s a chance it may run again someday, he answers.)
There are times, especially in the first half of the movie, where the quirk is laid on a bit too thick. When every line of dialogue is silly, and every supporting character is loudly eccentric, it threatens to become one-note. But the movie kept me laughing, and kept delighting me with its comic invention. And then the last scenes develop a mournful surrealism that took me by surprise. It begins with obvious cross-cultural jokes but builds into a genuine statement about cross-cultural harmony.
While I was watching Universal Language, I was scribbling down the names of other filmmakers whose work I was reminded of: Guy Maddin, Aki Kaurismaki, Jim Jarmusch, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Jacques Tati, Miranda July, The two Anders(s)ons—Wes and Roy. It also feels like an extended Kids in the Hall sketch, and it certainly owes a debt to the David Byrne movie True Stories, another tour of small-town eccentrics.
So it resembles a lot of other things, but I suspect Matthew Rankin has a genuinely new sensibility now that he’s worked his influences out of his system.
For Spokane Public Radio, I'm Dan Webster.
——
Nathan Weinbender is a co-host of Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM on KPBX and Saturday afternoons at 1:30 PM on KSFC.