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It wasn’t until later on, when Rankin fell in love with the work of acclaimed filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, that he drew a connection between his grandmother’s account and Iranian cinema, specifically films produced by an organization called the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, which produced several of Kiarostami’s films. The works, which Rankin called “humanistic and poetic,” often follow children navigating complex adult dilemmas.
Many of the institute’s films are “about our duty to others, and the importance of being kind,” said Rankin, who’s originally from Winnipeg. “There was something touching to me in the connection between my grandma, who was this elderly lady living in Winnipeg, and these Iranian films from the other side of the world.”
“Universal Language,” which opens Friday in Boston, can be seen as Rankin’s effort to use the language of cinema to link the two.
Matthew Rankin as “Matthew” in “Universal Language.”Courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories
“We are living in an era that is increasingly cruel, mean, and rigid. All manner of new binaries are emerging,” he said. “Art still has the power to create proximity, to create this closeness.”
“Universal Language” film takes place in a surreal version of Canada that seems to posit: What if Winnipeg were merged with Tehran? In this version of Winnipeg, residents are Iranian, speak a combination of Farsi and French, and dress in ‘80s attire. Here, the Canadian café chain Tim Hortons is a Persian teahouse, and local attractions — identified in the film by a freelance tour guide (Pirouz Nemati) roaming the city with his group — include a parking lot, a mall fountain, and a bus stop.
A scene from “Universal Language.”Courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories
The film begins by zeroing in on the two sisters and the banknote before branching off to track a handful of interwoven storylines. One focuses on a forlorn man named Matthew (Rankin), who, after years in Montreal, returns home to Winnipeg only to find an affectionate family of strangers living in the house where he grew up.
“You sort of sense in my character a Quebecois melancholy,” said Rankin. “But whatever sadness might have lingered in this house has been completely anesthetized by these loving people who now live there.”
Ila Firouzabadi, a co-writer on the film alongside Rankin and Nemati, said that the scene of the family was designed to evoke the warmth of certain homes in Tehran, where Firouzabadi was born. There, families are often “multigenerational, eating together, talking together, more than in Canada, where everything is more individual,” she said in the same interview.
A frame from “Universal Language.”Courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories
Throughout the film, Rankin makes use of careful compositions to contrast his stark, snowy setting with the quirky specificity of his characters. The city, as pictured, is full of nondescript buildings painted beige or gray and featuring rows of identical windows. The zany characters, styled in colorful parkas, pass among the anonymous structures as they go about their journeys.
Rankin saw this visual dissonance as an “interplay between the rigid and the fluid,” he said. “We wanted this world to be full of walls, full of containers, because that’s typically how we imagine the world,” he added. Yet the film challenges those divisions in the tender harmony of its characters.
“The idea is that it’s about a broader notion of belonging, and trying to think of the world as a whole place rather than a collection of fragments,” he said.
Firouzabadi, who lives in Montreal but frequently returns to Tehran to visit family, also saw the film as exploring the complex notion of home. “I’m exactly in this movie, in the intersection between Canada and Iran,” she said.
If the film suggests that cinema is one kind of universal language, another could be humor. The film is a comedy, albeit a straight-faced one, with the jokes emerging out of peculiar situations or ironic details. In addition to the mundane tour of Winnipeg, there is a turkey that wins a beauty contest, and a local man who walks around wearing a Christmas tree.
A scene from “Universal Language.”Courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories
The film “is not begging for laughs,” Rankin said. “It’s mainly these tableaux that are just kind of absurd. And if you connect on that humorous frequency, it’s very, very funny, but not every audience in every place has a sense of its deadpan.”
The humor resonated with audiences in Winnipeg and Tehran, the filmmakers said. The one place where it didn’t? “France,” Rankin said with a laugh, before clarifying that French audiences simply arrived later to the film’s comedic frequency than others.
Through its use of these universal languages, the film is designed to “enlarge the paradigm of how we understand belonging,” Rankin said.
“At this point in history,” he added, “making a gentle film about people being nice to each other in an intercultural context is something of a subversive act.”
Natalia Winkelman is a film critic based in Brooklyn, N.Y. Follow her @nataliawinke.
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