This is not much of a promotional video for Winnipeg
unless you love concrete and snow in that order
(Une langue universelle
آواز بوقلمون
Āvāz-e bughalamun)
dir: Matthew Rankin
2025
If you haven’t noticed yet, I live for movies. I love the very existence of movies, and have done so for many decades. But even I realise the futility of such a thing.
The movies will never love me back. You give your heart and soul to something, but what it gives you is something completely one-sided. All my adulation, all my longing is for naught…
But that’s okay. I will love cinema not one bit less ever just because it doesn’t love me back.
How else would I get to watch something as niche as this flick? A Canadian movie with the deliberate aesthetics and visual references to Iranian films of yesteryear, set in an alternate reality Winnipeg where Canada’s two main languages are Farsi and French?
That’s… so niche it’s created its own niche. Its own genre. A pigeonhole for one.
And then there’s that title, implying that maybe Farsi should be the universal language, or Quebecois, take yer pick, but I suspect in fact the title is talking more about friendship and kindness.
To say this is a weird film is both an understatement and false advertising, because while it’s weird, it’s more in the “gently odd” category rather than the outlandish or surreal. The easiest, laziest go-to I can think of is something like what Jared Hess first conjured way back when with Napoleon Dynamite, decades before making that Minecraft movie but without the catchphrases or quirks. This is not an outwardly quirky flick, nor is it a dark Lynchian sexual / violent odyssey into Winnipeg’s dank underbelly.
It is certainly odd, but I think it’s meant to be more comforting than alienating or off-putting for the sake of mockery or gags. There are elements of it that are clearly deeply felt (by the creator) even if they seem incredibly artificial, and everything, every scene feels painstakingly crafted.
For instance, there’s a scene where the character of Matthew, played by director Matthew Rankin, visits a cemetery which seems to be nestled between two parts of a very busy highway, and visits a tombstone, to place a flower in a pot on top of the grave of Laird Forbes Rankin, author and historian, memorable Manitoban, and clearly Matthew’s dad. I only know this because thankfully the subtitles translate the Farsi script on the tombstone, and it’s a touching moment for Matthew to be honouring his dad in such a way.
I wish I could honour my parents in such an elaborate way, because clearly that cemetery as depicted is a sight gag in itself, so someone created all those mock tombstones, placed them there, and filmed them in their best light in the middle of a Winnipeg winter, for this movie.
All of the film feels like that, as in well crafted, meticulously constructed, and while it is artificial, it doesn’t feel shallow. There are feels and vibes that are very particular, probably exclusive to the director himself, that he wants to get across on the screen, and if they’re not familiar to those of us who didn’t grow up in that era in Winnipeg, or work depressingly in Quebec, the hope is still that we’ll at least be amused.
It may be described as a comedy, but I can’t imagine the kind of person that would laugh uproariously at anything depicted here. But it is funny. Watching the polyglot deliberately dated ads on television screens trying to sell furniture or turkeys, in the outdated manner of (old) people yelling things in energised voices might not be universal, but it is funny.
Seeing an ad on the seat at a bus stop, of some lunatic real estate guy, with the translated Farsi script saying “Rob Peeler – I Never Sleep” as ad copy, will never not be funny to me
A woman on a bus complaining to the driver that she shouldn’t have to share her seat with a (live) turkey, and the driver telling her that the turkey has a ticket just like everybody else will never not be funny to me, even as they politely argue in Farsi. Matthew, upon quitting his government job in Quebec, is forced to endure an exit interview where he is strongly encouraged, in Quebecois of course, to never describe his experience of working for the government in any other terms other than “positive” or “neutral” when talking with anybody. He agrees that working for the Quebecois government was an entirely “neutral” experience. Meanwhile a man bawls his eyes out in an adjacent cubicle, violently expressing how “neutral” such work is for him.
Since the director himself in interviews mentions that he did have a very depressing experience working for the Quebecois government, you’d have to think that it’s one bridge worth burning, and hopefully that they aren’t going to come after him for saying that it was such a shitty experience. Apparently it involved making 19 short films ‘promoting’ Quebec, only four of which the government accepted, for some reason banning the other 15. Years of work, discarded so casually like trash…
As well, when he mentions to this strange figure (in a flick overflowing with strange characters and strange hair choices) who is doing the exit interview that he wants to go home and visit his mother in Winnipeg, the interviewer keeps confusing the province of Manitoba for Alberta, and won’t be dissuaded otherwise, which reoccurs throughout the flick. I don’t know if its purpose is to highlight the self-centredness or xenophobia of the Quebec locals, or some other trait, but, hey, he’s Canadian, and so can say whatever the fuck he wants about general geographical ignorance, as long as it’s in Farsi or French.
It may seem like the flick has a disjointed structure, but towards the end it’s woven together beautifully to show that the stories we thought were separate are entirely interlinked. In the beginning we see a harried teacher arrive at his class and berate his young students for their behaviour, clutching suit cases, angry at their lack of discipline or decorum, but the kids are fine, he’s acting like a nut, but it’s never not funny hearing a teacher despair that the students have convinced him humanity has no future. His berating of one student for being dressed up as Groucho Marx is perhaps a tad harsh, seeing as he tells him that his appearance disgusts everyone who sees it, only leads to greater frustration with the class when a student, asked to read writing on the blackboard leads to a story of a turkey stealing his glasses, and the entire class being punished.
Two of the glasses-less student’s classmates decide to help him out, and when they see money frozen in some ice along a footpath they decide digging that out will save their friend and get them all out of trouble. A shifty guy rolls up, sees the note, and tries to trick the girls into leaving the area so he can dig out the note himself, and as such he convinces them to seek out some such and such guy who might have an axe they can borrow, leading to directions and locations that include the “famous” Beige District and the Cold Packing district, all concrete and brick wonderlands lovingly filmed by cinematographer Isabelle Stachtchenko.
That shifty guy, throughout the movie, can be seen leading underwhelming tours to some of this alternative Winnipeg’s most unimpressive sites, including the Portage Place Mall and its decommissioned water fountain, the site of the 1958 Parallel Parking incident, a forgotten brief case on the edge of a seat at a bus stop, and a small sign honouring the founder of Manitoba, being Louis Riel.
And yet, though shifty, he has his link to Matthew, whose paths intertwine because of what’s happened to Matthew’s mother. At one point someone says that the names Matthew and Massoud are so similar, and to that I have to say, not really, but I guess the sentiment is meaningful.
Matthew’s mum has gone through some stuff, which I won’t spoil, but again that element doesn’t feel like something created for the movie, rather that it is an element the director chose to weave in from his own life, which again is sad but it serves the purpose of his movie, if it has a purpose at all.
Even if its purpose is comedic, even if the ironic / amusement levels are off the charts, there’s probably a deep humanity to what he’s trying to say and what the stories ultimately try to get at, about people being connected to each other even if they don’t know it, and that all life is enhanced through friendship and kindness, two elements rarely mentioned in the news we are forced to read every goddamn day. Instead we read about billionaires and government officials admonishing people for having empathy.
I know which message I’d rather hear and live with on the daily. Deeply informed by his knowledge of Iranian cinema, of the classics, the director has used that sensibility (and a lot of the aesthetics, somehow) to craft a movie that, for all its affectations and oddities, is still strongly hopeful about humanity, whether in Winnipeg or elsewhere.
And some days I need that, I really do.
8 times Universal Language somehow manages to be an antidote to despair out of 10
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“Just as the Assiniboine joins the Red River, we are all connected.” - Universal Language
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