DAN WEBSTER:
On a morning walk that I took recently with my friend Jim, a time in which we typically reflect on our lives and how we evolved into the men that we are, the topic of reality came up.
It went like this: What does it mean to overcome the trauma of childhood neglect? What is the process by which it is possible to see through all the defenses that we develop in our youth and recognize life for what it is—and ourselves as we really are?
When said out loud, it doesn’t seem like a particularly complicated problem. Mom and dad may have been overly judgmental, or uncommunicative… or, in fact, they may have had any number of deficiencies that ended up shaping us in ways that make our lives more of a struggle than they need to be.
Yet if there were any simple solutions to such a universal and long-standing social problem, there would be no need for psychology—nor for the millions of therapists who attempt to guide their clients toward better mental health.
The same can be said for art and the artists who create it. All good art, at least, in one way or another provides a commentary that probes the meaning of life: its benefits, its downfalls, its mysteries, its truths. The answers don’t have to be obvious, and in many cases seldom are. But the best works—everything from a drip painting by Jackson Pollock to a poem by Sylvia Plath—challenge us to seek our own explanations.
David Lynch, who died recently, knew this better than most. And it was Lynch whom I thought of when I sat this past weekend through a screening of Universal Language, a strange, surreal film by the Canadian-born filmmaker Matthew Rankin, co-written by Rankin, Ila Firouzabadi and Pirouz Nemati.
I don’t use the term “surreal” lightly. It’s one of those art terms that gets thrown around so much that it often loses it meaning. But if you consider the actual dictionary definition—to wit, “having the disorienting, hallucinatory quality of a dream”—it applies perfectly to what Rankin has put on the screen.
Universal Language tells three interlocking stories. The first follows two young girls who find a 500-riel bill (not an actual currency) encased in ice. They want to retrieve it to help a friend buy a new pair of glasses.
Another follows a would-be tour guide (played by the screenwriter Nemati) who specializes in taking his clients around the snow-laden, gray and beige city of Winnipeg to see sites that are as mundane as they are obscure—a shopping mall fountain that stopped working, for example, or a briefcase someone long ago left on a public bench.
And finally we have Rankin himself, playing a character named—appropriately enough—Matthew, who leaves his job in Montreal and travels back to his hometown of Winnipeg with plans to reconnect with his mother.
Most of all this seems normal enough, but then that’s where Rankin enters Lynchian territory—or I should say Lynchian-lite because while much of the tone that Rankin creates feels somber, most of the scenes that he gives us are so offbeat that it’s impossible not to laugh.
Example: Matthew leaves Montreal on a bus that features a woman complaining about the turkey—yes, a live turkey—that is sitting on the seat opposite to hers. Why should she have to endure this indignity, she declaims, when her son died in a marshmallow-eating contest and her husband was killed by a swarm of wasps.
Even more bizarre, Rankin presents his whole movie as if it were a recreation of a 20th-century Iranian film, with all the characters speaking Farsi or French (the film is suitably subtitled), and all the signs and billboards in Farsi as well, even the one hanging off the side of a teahouse disguised as a Canadian landmark Tim Hortons.
If I had to guess, I’d say that Rankin wants to make a universal statement about how hard life can be and the various ways—the processes, as it were—that we, as humans, struggle to make sense of it. He may not offer up any satisfactory answers, but then he isn’t obliged to. That task is entirely up to each of us.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio and a blogger for spokesman.com.