Review: Universal Language an absurdist comedy in the spirit of Wes Anderson

Universal Language is one of the more remarkable films of the decade. I’ve tried several times to explain it to different people and the look on their face betrays the same bafflement that mine did while I was watching it.

What they don’t get is that bafflement slowly turning to delight and awe as you get further through it. You have to watch it for that to happen.

On the surface we have this: Co-writer and director Matthew Rankin plays Matthew, a depressed Quebec public servant who decides to quit his dead-end job and return to his hometown of Winnipeg in Manitoba. It’s winter and there’s thick snow on the ground.

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Meanwhile, a pair of schoolchildren see a large denomination banknote frozen in the ice and try and work out how to get it out.

And Massoud is a volunteer tour guide, attempting to show off the city’s few historic landmarks – including an abandoned shopping mall and a monument to the city’s founder planted on the median strip of the motorway – to an increasingly uncomprehending group of tourists.

Apart from a smattering of French, everyone in the film speaks Farsi, the language of Iran. All of the shop signs and all of the building names are in Farsi.

And it’s for no apparent reason, other than Rankin is in love with Iranian cinema, went there as a young man in a failed attempt to apprentice himself to one/any of the great Iranian filmmakers, and has been teaching himself Farsi ever since.

In the press kit, Rankin describes how “Iranian cinema emerges out of 1000 years of poetry while Canadian cinema emerges out of 40 years of discount furniture commercials” and that’s basically what he’s made.

Universal Language is an absurdist comedy in the spirit of Wes Anderson, the deadpan comic stylings of Aki Kaurismaki or the visual non sequiturs of Jacques Tati.

But it’s also entirely its own. If I told you that one of the plot points turns on a prize turkey being given its own seat on a bus to the turkey retailer who’s going to love, cherish and respect it before, well, you know the natural end of that story, you might get a sense of the delightful weirdness on offer.

But it’s also desperately poignant, as we realise that Rankin has made a film to memorialise his own parents, ordinary middle-class Winnipeggers who, nonetheless, supported their weird son and his wild imagination.

They say that the more specific the context of a film, the more universal its story becomes. It’s the reason why Whale Rider was so beloved around the world when it was a story that could really only have come out of one place.

Universal Language could only have emerged from an ultra-specific location, the extraordinary noggin of Rankin, but that uniqueness is what makes it so precious.

Filmmakers around the world should take the lesson from this, that any effort you make trying to please an audience and not trying to work out what is uniquely you, is wasted effort.

I’m not going to pretend that Universal Language is for everyone – although the Audience Award at Cannes and 24 other wins around the world might suggest otherwise – and I feel sure that this isn’t the kind of film you wander into because the Superman session was sold out, but if this sort of thing sounds like you, then it will be very you. It was for me.