OBSERVER: Universal Language
In Winnipeg, a child dressed as Groucho Marx shows up to class and is immediately placed in a cupboard.
Another child confesses that a turkey stole his spectacles.
The exasperated teacher (Mani Soleymanlou) orders the class into the cupboard.
Outside, a long trail of children queues patiently in the snow for a turn on a single swing.
Later, two sisters, Negin (Rojina Esmaeili) and Nazgol (Saba Vahedyousefi), discover a 500 Riel bill frozen in ice.
Meanwhile, in Montreal, Matthew, played by director Matthew Rankin, explains to his supervisor that he must return home to see his ailing mother. In the background, a co-worker sobs.
In Winnipeg, a tour guide (Pirouz Nemati) leads a group through the “historic beige, grey and brown districts.”
Cinematographer Isabelle Stachtchenko frames the city with all the eerie bleakness of a Jeffrey Smart landscape.
Standing before a brutalist, cream brick block, someone asks the tour guide if anyone famous lived there.
“No, but many nice, unknown people have lived here.”
“Like whom?”
“A fax machine operator.”
Next, the guide points to the Forgotten Briefcase on a bench, abandoned since 1978, now a UNESCO World Heritage site, “a monument to absolute inter-human solidarity, even at its most banal.”
The guide then takes the group through an abandoned mall, where a derelict fountain no longer spouts water as “all wishes are cancelled.”
Spoken in Farsi and French, Universal Language is a strange, off-centre film that never loses its unsettled ambience.
A sense of melancholy and dislocation pervades the characters, as if lost between cultures.
Reminiscent of Jacques Tati and Elia Suleiman, Rankin threads the disparate narratives through the city scape, asking what future generations will memorialise of the modern city.
Universal Language opens in cinemas on May 22.
Review by Kathryn Keeble