Universal Language is, at its core, a community portrait. Matthew Rankin’s second feature was co-written and imagined by friends and collaborators Pirouz Namati and Ila Firouzabadi, with all three of them appearing in the film alongside people they know and love. Their film charts the clashes and convergences between a small network of eccentric characters residing in a temporally and culturally blurred version of Winnipeg, Manitoba, where the official languages are Farsi and French.
While a man named Matthew (played by Rankin) returns home from a lengthy Montreal sojourn in search of his semi-estranged mother, two sisters (Rojina Esmaeili & Saba Vahedyousefi) set about extricating a banknote they’ve found frozen beneath a patch of ice, and a tour guide named Massoud (played by Namati) leads a group of apathetic visitors through sites that collapse the mystical with the mundane; a brutalist parkade, a deserted shopping mall patrolled by overzealous cops, a newly-visible fresco adorning an apartment complex, a suitcase left collectively untouched on a bus stop bench, and a gravesite on a highway traffic island. These frigid locales and rigid architectures are also populated by gestures of love, generosity, and communal care, made all the more meaningful by strains of misery and absurdity on the sidelines. All of the film’s surreal, interlaced happenings are filtered through an exploratory yet unobtrusive visual grammar that pays homage to Iranian and Canadian cinemas alike.
Questions of collectivity and contrast run deep throughout Universal Language, and I had the pleasure of discussing them with Matthew Rankin and Ila Firouzabadi over Zoom.
Alexander Mooney: I watched this movie at the TIFF lightbox in Toronto where they played Matthew’s recorded intro, in which he emphasizes the collaborative nature of the project. Since you’ve also said that many Iranian Winnipeggers were used in the film, and it seems that multiple actors were deeply involved on a creative level from the start — present company included — what was the casting process like for this? Did you write certain characters with people already in mind or did the ensemble form more gradually?
Matthew Rankin: Yeah, we did. There was sort of a story written first and then when it came time to make a script, which for us was a very organic process, it was sort of constantly evolving and changing. And while we were filming, it changed quite a bit also. But yes, most of the characters were kind of by design — maybe at the point of their conception, but certainly if not, they were adjusted later — for people that we knew. And most of the people in the movie are friends — people we know quite well. There’s a few professional actors, but for the most part we imagined this person playing that role. The only real exception to that was the kids, who we didn’t know.
Ila Firouzabadi: Yeah, for the kids we did auditions. There’s an Iranian Farsi school in Montreal, so we just put out an announcement and we said, “we need kids from this age to this age and [they need] no experience at all.” So the day after, 50 kids just came in and they were so interesting, all of them. So most of them are in the movie, even in small roles. As Matthew always says, we want to have everybody in [it], if they’re really interested to be in the film.
MR: It’s like a school play.
IF: Yeah. But [for] the two girls, we were really impressed by their performance and attitude in the first meeting. Originally, the script was a brother and sister, but when we met them, we really liked them and we changed the script to [make it] two girls.
AM: On the school play point, I have a bit of a two-parter: How did this sense of collaboration translate to the practical realities and demands of your set? The collective passion resonates very clearly from this movie, but as we all know, filmmaking can be incredibly stressful. Did you have fun making Universal Language?
IF: Yes, of course!
MR: Yeah, it was so much fun.
IF: So much fun.
MR: Of course, it was very hard work, but it was very joyous. I think that the deepest fun is when you go beyond “fun” and you get into joy. That’s deep. But, yeah, there was a lot of joy in just being together. I mean, I feel like that really works when you do your casting — well, not only the casting of the actors, but casting of the crew — and everybody has something to say through the prism of the movie we’re making together. So, yeah, it was a very joyous process. I really love everybody who made this movie, and there were a lot of very long hugs on set.
IF: Yeah, it was very joyful. As you know, it was most of the time in Winnipeg and Montreal, so it was -30, -40 [Celsius] for 12 hours outside shooting with kids and everybody. But at the end of the day, everybody was happy because everybody really wanted to participate with their heart in this movie and they put all their energy, in a very positive way, into it. And the set was so friendly because most of them were our closest friends. It’s like having a huge party and [working] together.
MR: Yeah, it’s a spiritual and very intimate thing to make a film, and we were all really close. We were already close at the beginning and were even closer by the end. It was this really… I like to describe it as a brain. It’s like sort of building this brain and… when everybody’s serving that brain, [it] becomes really intelligent — more intelligent than each of us individually and so we’re there to serve the brain, and it’s so beautiful to be in [it]. We showed the film at Cannes and everybody came! Most of the other film delegations [were] maybe five people, but we were like 40, and it’s because we just love being in that brain.
AM: Ila, this is a film populated with brief yet vivid impressions on the sidelines, and your character is no different. What inspired the style and mannerisms of that bus driver character? Was there anything you found surprising about acting in a movie for the first time?
IF: Yeah, actually it was! When Matthew suggested that to me, to be a punk bus driver from Montreal to Winnipeg, it was tempting, but I said, “let me think a little bit.” It’s funny because just a couple of weeks ago, I was telling my best friends that I really dream to have a truck and just travel around and make the interior my style, and when he suggested [the role] to me, it was a little bit shocking too, that it just read my mind. Then I told him, let me think, and “a little bit” was maybe 10 minutes. It was difficult, you know, because [it was my] first time [acting], but I really like it. I [was] telling Matthew, I just want to be a bus driver in whatever movie [he’s] making.
MR: Just the character driving some sort of vehicle.
AM: That would be a fun recurring figure.
MR: Yeah, that was really fun. I mean, that whole bus — not just your outfit — was sort of by your design. It’s not translated, but Ila is listening to a boxing match on the radio at the beginning of the scene. You hear a little bit of it and it’s Muhammad Ali Clay versus George Foreman. So we figured out the character is a boxing fanatic. And then, of course, she goes back to collect her boxing mitts [when the bus breaks down].
IF: Yeah, that. In Farsi we wrote on them “eternal love,” but you can’t see it. It’s these small things that [are such a] pleasure for me and Matthew and the whole art department. So we made it [that way] together, and there’s very small codes in it.
MR: That’s really true. It’s a good example of how we design. For every character, it was like that. They’re in their world and they express themselves personally in that world. That’s sort of how all the detail comes through.
AM: Matthew, the colors beige, brown, and gray are obviously really dominant in the movie. How did you and your DP go about creating a look for the film that would honor this while still keeping your images textured and vibrant? Does your background in animation affect the way you think about lighting in mise en scène?
MR: Probably. My friend Trevor Anderson said something really interesting about how film directors come from two places — either they come from the world of theater and acting and they’re afraid of the camera, or they come from the world of images and they’re afraid of actors. I’m definitely in that second category. I do really think in terms of images — much more so than in terms of words. I began drawing at a very young age, I drew all the time, and that slowly transformed into animated films and then experimental films and documentary, and now fiction. So creating a visual language is really important to me. I really love to have a formal challenge, and I love cinematic language, first and foremost. But the beige, that was sort of something that came — I mean, the film is sort of seeking an interzone, right? It’s a film that’s seeking the Tehran within Winnipeg and seeking the Winnipeg within Tehran, and the beige structures were [part of] an echo between the two cities. When I went to Tehran, I was really struck by the beige buildings in that city, it really reminded me of Winnipeg. And similarly, Ila went to Winnipeg for the first time when we were scouting the film and had the same experience that the beige of Winnipeg made her think of Tehran. So beige became the tuning fork [for the] interzone that we identified quite early on. So the look of the film was sort of assigned by that. The two cities have kind of a similarity, in a strange way.
IF: Yeah, they really have [a] similarity, as Matthew said — architectural wise, humor wise. [The] dark humor is really similar. Of course, this is Winnipeg, that’s Tehran, but [at] some points, they really match and you see the similarity. He saw the similarity in Tehran and with Iranians. I also saw the similarity with his friends in Winnipeg.
MR: The film is really about these improbable connections, and there’s many of them that we found in the process of making the film.
AM: Were any of the sites of interest on Massoud’s tour based on real life or inspired by it?
MR: Yeah, the fountain is a real fountain. What he describes is exactly the truth. The fountain no longer works, they refuse to fix it. They said they won’t do it — I asked them. In the script, I think the hope was that the fountain would suddenly go off. [Massoud] would say all this, and then suddenly the fountain would burst forth. But they told us that would never happen. It was dead. So anyway, then all wishes are canceled, right? That sort of became the thing. The forgotten briefcase was something that happened to me in Tehran. I forgot my bag in a train station, and seven hours later I went back to get it, and it was in exactly the same spot. No one had touched it. That was something I found really sweet. I was touched by that. The Louis Riel grave, that’s a real place, but it’s not actually in that spot. I feel like things are funny when there’s tension, and one of the tensions that the film is playing with is the [one] between the banal and the sublime, between the divine and the ridiculous. So placing the Louis Riel monument in this meaningless intersection was sort of part of that strategy. But yeah, they’re all connected to reality. That’s the thing about the movie, is that it’s a crossfade between realities, but they all have an echo in the real world.
AM: That’s great you mentioned tension because I was going to ask you about all of these contrasting elements, and it seems like you’re consciously pursuing these tensions in your filmmaking. How do you think tension relates to the idea of the fluidity that you’ve said elsewhere was crucial to the project?
MR: Yeah, very much so, yes. It is a very fluid world, sort of a crossfade. It’s an interweaving which is intricate and has a very light touch. It’s not trying to convince you of anything. There is contrast in the film, but not in a sense of conflict. There’s no oppositional paradigm within the film. There are angry characters, but they’re there for comic effect, and they’re part of the humor of the film. But there’s no big conflict. I feel like the tension comes from trying to figure out where you are and when — the relationship between the real world and the represented world. That’s something that is interesting to us, but the story is really just people being very gentle and sweet with each other. But the “oo” is kind of the key, right? That’s sort of the tuning fork.
IF: Yeah, because “oo,” in Farsi, [is] kind of “they.” We don’t really have “he” and “she.”
MR: Yeah, there are no gendered pronouns.
IF: There are no gender components, so we took it as a [basis for] this movie. That is, this movie is kind of like “oo.”
AM: I noticed a lot of blurred gender lines within the cast as well.
IF: Exactly. So we were trying to do so many [layered] things. Not exactly directly for the audience, but very small… codes in the movie. We’re thinking that [the] audience can find the code, which is interesting. You know, not everything [is given directly]. We wanted [it] to be little by little and people experience it later — under the skin, in a way. So that was our goal, too.
AM: The movie ends with a pretty devastating moment of transference between the two male leads. Can you speak to how this might relate to the porousness of boundaries and contrasts found elsewhere in the film?
MR: It’s like when you look at an international border — humans have imagined a very rigid line between this country and that country. [This] line we have determined and imagined and mapped that we rigidly insist upon — which influences our geopolitics and our hatreds and all of this — when you [physically] look at the line, it’s actually the same space. That’s [the] space that is interesting to us, the interzone between. Where is the zone where one identity ends and another begins? We have tried to organize the world into these rigidities, but in our lives it’s infinitely more fluid. What is the space where I end and Ila begins and vice versa? You know what I mean? There is a zone in which we both exist, and that might be where we exist the most. So that moment of transference is, in a way, kind of a synthesis. There’s this line in this Parajanov I really like, The Color of Pomegranates, where it says: “we were looking for ourselves in each other.” And for us, that’s what that moment is about.
Comments are closed.