‘Universal Language’ Review: If Tehran Were Winnipeg

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‘Universal Language’ Review: If Tehran Were Winnipeg

Actually, the onscreen text that I could read was in English subtitles, because the logo was rendered in Persian — unexpected for a purportedly Winnipeg-based organization. It’s the first indication that this movie is not set in a world strictly like our own. In their screenplay, Rankin, Ila Firouzabadi and Pirouz Nemati came up with a world that is sort of a thought experiment: What if Tehran were Winnipeg? Or Winnipeg were Tehran? What if the landscapes were snowy, the Tim Hortons were teahouses and everyone spoke Persian?

Persian and French, technically — this is Canada after all. There’s no reason given for this alt-historical fact: This is just normal Canada but with Iranian cultural traditions having fully melded with ********* ones for whatever reason. In fact, the first scene is set in a French-immersion language school full of rambunctious children, including one dressed up as Groucho Marx (cigar included) and one, named Omid (Sobhan Javadi), who insists that a turkey stole his glasses. The ill-tempered teacher (Mani Soleymanlou), who excoriates the children for not even having “the decency to misbehave in French,” declares that there will no school until Omid has glasses again.

“A turkey stole my glasses” is the sort of thing that a kid would come up with only if turkeys were wandering around town, and indeed, this Winnipeg is obsessed with turkeys. Old men in the Tim Hortons teahouse (a Tim Hortons sign rendered in Persian is one of the film’s many sight gags) talk all day about their turkeys, the turkeys they’ve lost, the glory of their beautiful turkeys. Maybe it’s just the unfailingly snowy weather, but everyone seems to be sad about something — there’s a “Kleenex repository” in town to supply tissues to everyone and a resident lacrimologist studying tears at the cemetery, which is situated between a bunch of highways.

Other characters wander through the story, which is shot in a richly textured style meant to mimic the films of the Iranian New Wave — essentially, Winnipeg as Tehran, circa 1970. There’s a tour guide (Pirouz Nemati) who has seemingly ensnared some rare Winnipeg tourists into following him around to see the sites of interest, all of which are fabulously commonplace, like the location of The Great Parallel Parking Incident of 1958, or the UNESCO-designated site where someone left a briefcase at a bus stop and nobody has moved it in years, nor peered into it. “The Forgotten Briefcase and its bench,” the guide tells the group, is “a monument to absolute inter-human solidarity, even at its most basic and banal.”

In another small plot, two girls (Rojina Esmaeili and Saba Vahedyousefi) discover a 500-riel bill (the word seems to be a play on the Iranian currency, called rial) frozen in ice, and they realize this could be the answer to all of their problems: If they could get it out, then they could get glasses for Omid, and school could start again. But first they need an ax. Where will they get an ax?

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