The quickest way I can sum up the slow-moving, weirdly touching cinematic oddity that is “Universal Language” is to ask you to imagine what it would look like if Iran were in Canada.
This is not as insane as it sounds. Well, it is, but stay with me. Matthew Rankin, a Manitoba-born, Montreal-based experimental filmmaker, so loves the Iranian New Wave movies of the 1970s and beyond — the films of Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen and Samira Makhmalbaf, Jafar Panahi, and others — that he has ported their neorealist style, situations and language to the icebound terrain of a make-believe Winnipeg. All the men call one another “Agha” here, a Farsi term of respect that extends behind the camera as well.
“Universal Language” is the result: a trilogy of overlapping tales that appears to be absurdist but that gathers force and soulful undercurrents of melancholy. It is as far from the commercial mainstream as narrative filmmaking gets, but for connoisseurs of the poetic bizarre, it has its very real enchantments.
There are lots of ingredients to the meal: the neo-slapstick of Jacques Tati (“Mon Oncle”), the loopy Canadian surrealism of Guy Maddin (“My Winnipeg”), the deadpan tableaux of Sweden’s Roy Andersson (“A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence”). Most clearly, the storyline in which two young sisters (Rojina Esmaeili and Saba Vahedyousefi) embark on a wintry odyssey to retrieve a 500-riel banknote from its coffin of sidewalk ice echoes the 1987 Kiarostami classic “Where Is the Friend’s House?,” one of the most humane movies ever made. (If none of these titles ring a bell, you’ve got some enjoyable homework to do.)
Where Kiarostami’s film pulled hope from hardship, Rankin is more interested in straight-faced comedy, with the younger sister a committed grouch and the older a more practical sort. A second storyline concerns Massoud (Pirouz Nemati), a customer service representative at the Winnipeg Earmuff Authority and freelance tourist guide to the city’s stranger attractions, like a random briefcase that has lain abandoned on a bus stop bench for so many decades that it’s become a UNESCO World Heritage site.
The third strand in “Universal Language” stars the director himself as Matthew, a civil servant (in a Quebec that has finally managed to secede from the rest of Canada) who returns home to Winnipeg to find he’s been replaced in his aged mother’s heart and memory by Massoud, who out of kindness has pretended to be her absent son for so long that the imposture has taken root. By the time Matthew fully understands what has happened, the movie has edged into something contemplative and profoundly sad — a snowy landscape in which we’re all on our own yet mysteriously bound to one another. As Massoud assures him, “Just as the Assiniboine joins the Red River and together they flow into Lake Winnipeg, we are all connected, Agha.”
Rankin packs the background of “Universal Language” with snippets of other storylines, wayward characters and cross-cultural felicities: You won’t soon forget the Tim Hortons coffee shop decorated in the style of an Iranian teahouse. One of the regulars there (Mohammad Salari) is a turkey entrepreneur mourning the bird that got away; there’s also a man dressed as a Christmas tree, a boy dressed as Groucho Marx, a government worker loudly weeping at his desk for reasons unknown, many references to a building called the Kleenex Repository, and a French immersion teacher who recites a Persian poem that turns out to be the lyrics of the 1969 Guess Who hit “These Eyes.” Which was a Winnipeg band, don’tcha know.
All this nonsense can get tedious, especially in the film’s midsection, when the charm starts wearing thin and the pieces haven’t yet started to snap together. But “Universal Language” is worth sticking with until its final scenes, in which identities blur and commingle with an enigmatic hush, like those bleak winter days when one’s isolation somehow feels shared with the whole of humanity. In a recent interview with Toronto film critic Norm Wilner, Rankin spoke of the wonderful foolishness of his cinematic mash-up and of his belief that “Iranian cinema emerges out of a thousand years of poetry, and Winnipeg cinema emerges out of 40 years of discount furniture commercials. There is something absurd about putting those together, and yet, that is our world.” Indeed, and we’re welcome to it.
Unrated. At AMC Montgomery 16, AMC Shirlington 7 and Cinema Arts Theatres. Contains nothing objectionable aside from a few ominous turkeys. 89 minutes. In Farsi and French, with subtitles.
Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.