RATING
Director(s): Matthew Rankin
Country: Canada
Author: lla Firouzabadi, Pirouz Nemati, Matthew Rankin
Actor(s): Pirouz Nemati, Matthew Rankin, Amir Amiri
Written by Tom Augustine
‘Artificial intelligence’ is such an insistent, malignant presence in our current landscape that you don’t seem able to turn your head without being confronted by it. It is ethically and creatively bankrupt, yes. It’s ugly as sin, yes. But yet another of its innumerable evils is the shame it brings to the notion of absurdism. The unavoidable uncanniness that generative AI trades in offers nothing of substance, as it merely reflects the human experience of the world, rather than be filtered through it. The uncanniness of AI is corrosive, soulless — a deep, oozing spiritual wrongness that should only be responded to with outright rejection. A genuinely absurd, transportative experience is available to filmgoers right now — Matthew Rankin’s exquisite Universal Language, a film that could never be conjured by an artificial intelligence model, so uniquely human-made it is in the most wonderful ways. Watching the film, which imagines a world dreamily familiar and yet quite unlike our own, such that I was frequently scratching my head in fascination — how did they pull that off? — my despairing slop-clogged mind saw the difference between the human creative engine and the artificial one. Rankin’s film is full to bursting with references, inputs from filmmakers and creatives as varied as Abbas Kiarostami, Wes Anderson, Roy Andersson and the Marx Brothers, but the resulting work feels profoundly personal, intimate, emotional. It is all eccentric artifice, and yet the viewer’s soul feels truly full by film’s end. There is no facsimile of human emotion here.
Universal Language has a certain level of buy-in that may be off-putting to the casual moviegoer. From the outside, its cavalcade of references, particularly to the subtle pleasures of Iranian cinema, may appear impenetrable and thus not worth venturing into. A film nerd such as myself will find myriad winks and nods to fawn over, it’s true, but Rankin’s film may be even better experienced by one going in without that background of understanding. Its poetic, hypnotic rhythms are quite unlike anything else at the cinema this year, defying categorisation — at times, a bleakly hilarious satire in the vein of the work of Roy Andersson; at others a heart-swelling testament to the ineffable nature of existence a la Kiarostami. That particular Iranian filmmaker is evidently at the heart of Universal Language. Kiarostami is one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived, his Where is the Friend’s Home?, Close-Up, And Life Goes On… and Taste of Cherry all strong contenders for Greatest of All Time status. And yet, awareness of his work is not as pervasive as other greats — your Kubricks and Hitchcocks. If you’ve not experienced his particular blend, Universal Language rolls it into a package where it sits easily alongside winking absurdism and comically bleak expressions of modern-day drudgery. We’re in a wintry, frozen-over Winnipeg, which in the world of Universal Language is Canada by way of Iran. All the characters speak Persian (or, in Québécois cases, French). The city is frozen over Canada, but the signs and ads are all in Arabic. The people put sugar cubes in their mouths before drinking tea at the various tea-houses of this alternative universe. In this world, stories, seemingly unconnected, begin to slowly converge. In one, a pair of young schoolgirls find frozen in the ice a large banknote and are determined to get it out. In another, a tour guide leads a gaggle of freezing tourists to various, hilariously mundane ‘landmarks’ of Winnipeg (including a carpark and an abandoned mall). And in the third, a man named Matthew Rankin (played by the filmmaker) leaves a job in Québec and begins a mysterious journey to his hometown to see his mother after a long absence.
Set in an absurdist version of Winnipeg where everyone speaks Farsi, Canadian filmmaker Matthew Rankin’s hilarious, hypnotically moving series of intersecting stories of mundanity and misery is one of the finest films you can see in cinemas this year. Frequently, it feels like you’ve fallen into another world entirely.
Surreal, humourous touches dot both the landscape of Universal Language and its filmic construction. In an early, very funny scene, Rankin is being let go by his work — a brutalist office environment in which a man audibly sobs unseen inside a cubicle nearby. Rankin the director lets the scene play out by crossing the 180-degree line, a foundational rule of filmmaking that ensures that characters don’t end up looking in the same direction during a scene. Rankin’s visual trickery here and rapid-fire cutting creates a disorienting effect that becomes funnier the longer it goes on. Elsewhere, a student at the girls’ school gets in trouble for losing his glasses, which have been ‘stolen’ by a runaway turkey, which has fled a turkey butchery run by two singing cowboys. One schoolboy goes to meet his mother at the factory where she works, which produces one item — Kleenex tissues. If this all sounds unbearably twee, the remarkable achievement of Universal Language is the way all of these elements are subsumed into a wider, gently existential mood. The humour is not insistent, it bubbles up naturally, and the way all these disparate elements begin to coalesce in the film’s dreamy final third emphasises the deep wells of emotion that pool around Universal Language’s immaculate world design. It is a disarmingly sincere film, one where each scene offers a new face, visual point of interest or narrative turn that feels unexpected, yet totally consistent with Rankin’s aims. The film’s frozen-over wintriness feels paradoxically inviting, as though we are observing the cold from a picture window in a friend’s cosy home.
What specifically Rankin is trying to say with the film is intentionally diffuse — there is no overriding ‘idea’ to the film’s many funny, strange scenarios. I think what reverberated most for me was a notion of home, and homelessness, that Rankin seems fascinated with, particularly in the film’s devastating denouement. As with Kiarostami’s Where is the Friend’s Home?, there is a gentle, unfolding unreality to the characters’ neverending quests here — the girls’ search for a tool to break the ice leads them further and further astray; the tour continues on and on even as the tourists grumble and whinge; Rankin wanders streets aimlessly in search of his mother — and a gradual pall of lostness settles like the mortal-coil shifting dust of Taste of Cherry. Even the world of Universal Language, its impossible amalgamation of West and Middle East, contributes to this outsider feeling. The architecture and landscape is hostile and cold even as the people within radiate warmth and spirit. Rankin uses his influences here to process regrets and longings. The findings are not often easily explained, but make total, human sense. When I see something made by a machine, masquerading as something human, I feel lost. This monstrosity, pushed upon us by corporate nobodies who cannot create, cannot see value beyond the monetary and are insisting we use this tool that seeks to displace and degrade us, seems to be winning. Inarguably, cinema cannot be without the human element — the tactile notion of construction and of building out our inner world for others to see. We seem so eager to lose that — how many people will go and see Universal Language? How many more will watch AI slop on Instagram? AI, and the people who peddle it, have no interest in these unquantifiable, unanswerable inquiries of the soul, and therefore cannot make art. Be one of those who still values such things — go and see Universal Language. You will not regret it.
Universal Language is in cinemas now.