A disarming look at Iranians in Canada

 

    In his new movie, Universal Language, director Matthew Rankin, a Canadian with Iranian roots, turns the ordinary into a weirdly amusing norm as he transplants fragments of Persian culture into a frozen Canadian city.

   Rankin sets most of his movie in Winnipeg, which -- in the movie -- becomes an Iranian enclave resembling an arctic outpost. Beige, brown and grey apartment and office buildings create an impersonal  backdrop for a tapestry of storylines that appear, disappear, and ultimately converge.

     I've never been to Winnipeg. If you have, you may not recognize the city Rankin invents. The characters speak Persian -- with dashes of French adding fillips of cultural collision. Street signs are written in Persian, an ironic expression considering that Iranians make up less than one percent of Canada's population.

     A feeling of chilled sadness sometimes settles over the  proceedings, which are presented in such a matter-of-fact way, we’re knocked off our moorings. Rankins's characters, both children and adults, never act as if anything might be amiss; they don't rebel against the world in which they find themselves: They live in it.

     Sadness and humor become soul mates. We meet a woman who works as a lacrymologist. She collects tears at the local cemetery. At home, she keeps jars full of tears on her living room shelves. Were they shed over a lost homeland? Lost loves? The pain of living? You fill in the blank.

    The town's Kleenex repository staffed by a man dressed in a formal white suit supports the idea that the town's residents cry a lot. Rows of open Kleenex boxes line the shelves of what seems to be a quasi-official location.

    Rankin takes us to a store that sells only turkeys; the store's proprietor is bereft over a special turkey that got lost in transit to him. His love for turkeys runs deep, as must the town's love of turkey dinners.

    Strands of silliness lace through the movie's fabric. At one point, a character mentions an agency known as the Winnipeg Earmuff Authority. Many characters wear outsized earmuffs, colorful exclamation points in a desaturated world.

    The movie plays a neat trick. Instead of the emigres feeling misplaced; we do. There's nothing antagonistic about Rankin's approach; he embeds odd touches into the quotidian rhythms of his characters' lives.

    In Winnipeg, a tour guide moves through the city pointing out sites of preposterous insignificance, notably a parking lot where the Great Parallel Parking Dispute of 1958 occurred.

    Rankin leaves it to us to sort through the movie’s jests and conceits: a kid who attends school dressed as Groucho Marx, an attempt to retrieve money that has been frozen under ice, a late-picture identity swap involving a character played by Rankin,  a former government worker who travels from Montreal to Winnipeg to visit his aging mother.

    Those more familiar with Canada than I probably will appreciate more of Rankin's wry but gentle humor. Know, though, that Universal Language is the work of an artist with a keen appreciation for the absurdities that accompany displacement, as well as for the absurdities of the strange environment his characters inhabit. 

    Critics have pointed out that Universal Language contains trace elements of the cinema of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami and of Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki. True, but Universal Language speaks its own disarming language.

   So what's the universal language to which the title refers? It's neither Persian nor French. It can't be found on street signs or at the local Tom Hollands restaurant where tea is served from a samovar. It may be found in the ridiculousness lengths some of Rankins's characters go for others. Better to be absurdly kind than absurdly cruel.

    Not everyone will want to make this trip to Winnipeg,  but those who appreciate the quiet audacity of Rankin's vision will find a movie that amuses and enriches as it mingles laughter and tears.

     Toward the end of the movie, the brother of the man who owns the turkey store sings a mournful Persian love song. The Canadian group The Guess Who's Those Eyes follows on the soundtrack. 

     "These eyes cry every night for you.'' So goes the opening lyric of Those Eyes. Universal Language echoes that plaintive sentiment while never forgetting to smile at the unspoken heartbreak that may have prompted all those tears.