Little Persia in Canada, Speaking a ‘Universal Language’

The westbound Greyhound bus breaks down just before reaching the junction where the Trans-Canada Highway enters Winnipeg. On the road sign, aside from the French word Bienvenue (“Welcome”), everything else — the city’s name and the phrase “A Great City,” for instance — is written entirely in Persian. Inside the city of Winnipeg, all street signage, including the iconic Canadian fast-food chain Tim Hortons, appears only in Persian — this is Universal Language, a film by Winnipeg-born director Matthew Rankin.

The middle-aged man played by Matthew himself resigns from his government job in Montreal, preparing to return to his hometown to take care of his mother. Yet neither his former supervisor nor the Greyhound ticket clerk seems to know that Winnipeg is in Manitoba — both assume it’s a city in Alberta. “I voted yes in the 1995 Quebec independence referendum. I don’t care about Canada’s geography,” the supervisor says.

But the director does care about his hometown. Still, he turns Winnipeg — an English-speaking Canadian city — into a surreal Persian-speaking world devoid of English, complete with a French-language school. The film begins at this very school. After school, two students try to dig up a 500 Iranian rial banknote buried deep beneath the ice. Following a parody of the opening credits found in Iranian children’s films — “Presented by the Winnipeg Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Adolescents” — we see a fixed long take of a school building with the Persian words in on a bright, snowy day. A tardy teacher bursts into the classroom where the kids are causing a ruckus and scolds them in Persian: “You don’t even have the decency to misbehave in French?”

Maybe it’s true — Winnipeg really isn’t much of a tourist destination. Even a child who announces in class that he wants to become a tour guide after he grows up actually has a father who’s a part-time guide. “Winnipeg doesn’t get many tourists, but I like showing people around the places I care about,” the father says. For instance, he tries to reenact an irrelevant parallel parking incident from 1985 with some actors to a tiny, visibly bored tour group; he leads them to silently mourn for half an hour in front of the grave of Louis Riel, the father of Manitoba; he points out a beige building where no celebrity ever lived; he highlights an unidentified and unclaimed briefcase on a bus stop bench; and he explains how an unfunctional fountain inside a shopping mall is a popular attraction. The film creator transforms the bench with the briefcase into a UNESCO World Heritage Site, symbolizing humanity’s most modest yet profound sense of solidarity.

It reminded me of something I once saw on the moorlands of Cornwall, England: a farmhouse with a sign solemnly posted outside its fence, declaring, “In 1978, absolutely nothing happened here.”

To travel in a city where nothing surprising ever happens, to guide visitors through it, or even to make a film about it— all with a Waiting for Godot-like sense of nihilism — somehow often gives rise to a quietly absurd charm. Universal Language, which won the Directors’ Fortnight Audience Award at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, is full of precisely this kind of absurdity. Amid its persistent snowscapes and frozen backdrops, it also carries a faint air of melancholy.

The civil servant who quits his job to return home and care for his mother, the children digging for a 500-rial note, and the tour guide working hard to buy his son new glasses after his old pair was stolen by a turkey — all of them are Winnipeggian versions of Vladimir and Estragon, who are stuck in a city and waiting in vain for a man named Godot. In the end, the story doesn’t veer entirely into nihilism. After a series of dead ends and misunderstandings, they each reach a kind of happy ending — though tinged with a subtle sense of loss.

The boy’s glasses are retrieved by the two kind-hearted girls trying to unearth the 500-rial note. No longer needing to spend money on replacement glasses, the tour guide buries the note — which he’d arguably acquired through petty deceit — back into the frozen ground. The civil servant finally sees his mother, only to be mistaken by her for the very tour guide who’d been looking after her all these years. The director, with gentle humor, swaps the two men’s looks. A gust of wind blows open the balcony door, and the laundry on the rack freezes solid, like chicken in a freezer. Behind the freezer at the turkey shop, an elderly man begins to sing a Persian poem, accompanied by the delicate strains of the santur.

Raised in Winnipeg, Matthew studied history at different universities in Quebec, and — thanks in part to his Iranian mother and his deep love for Iranian cinema — spent a few years in Iran in his early twenties. He once remarked, “Iranian cinema is rooted in a thousand-year-old tradition of poetry, while Canadian cinema was born out of 40 years of discount furniture commercials.” Perhaps this explains the strange dual world his film inhabits. In it, Tim Hortons serves both donuts and bubble tea; Iranian immigrants carry Christmas trees into corner stores adorned with portraits of ice hockey legends. In short, Matthew has created a world that is dreamlike and uncanny — at once alien and strangely familiar.

Perhaps it was because I’d eaten too much — entering the world of Universal Language, I found myself happily lulled into a kind of hypnosis. I couldn’t follow the story, nor did I want to. Within a highly fictionalized real-world setting, carried along by Quebecois French and Persian, riding Greyhound buses and guided by peculiar compositions, I drifted into a wintry dreamscape.

“This film is like a peculiar platypus: part lonely Quebecois grey cinema, part surreal Winnipeg puzzle film, and part Iranian poetic realism — each refracting and reflecting the others through its own prism.” That was how Matthew beautifully described his work in one interview.

Lost in this snowy dream, I couldn’t quite make out the shape of the platypus, but I was nonetheless entranced by its unique audiovisual language — a universal language imbued with both homesickness and the fantasies of foreign lands.