Review: UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

A rowdy French class gets disciplined by its teacher who's at his wits' end. What threw him off was the myopic boy who claims his glasses were stolen by a turkey. Sir bundles them all in the bad closet and says he won't teach them again until the boy has glasses again. This begins an expansive weave of threads as we follow characters through the snowy town who are looking for solutions. 

Matthew Rankin's absurdist canvas contains a gentle but resonant rug-pull about three quarters of  the way through. When it's revelation is clear it changes this film from something I might begrudgingly like to a work of satisfying depth. 

Until that point, though, it ain't easy. Once you've lost count of scenes of children walking against screen filling walls and dialogue whose whimsy borders on painful you would be forgiven for thinking that this is one of those movies you pick on your MIFF pass because you like the venue. When you get to the character dressed as a Christmas tree, your memories of Roy Anderson movies (I don't mean Wes, Roy is Swedish and can be even worse) might come flooding back with the weight of bad exam days.

But there is, in this case, more. I had to begin by telling myself that these separate narratives were like folk tales and the city which is described as zones of colour like beige or grey depending on the brick work is lent a fabulous look by its endless walls and barely snatched images of the white winter sky. This is Canada but it is a Canada whose French component is complimented by Persian rather than English. Don't ask me.

Actually, you can ask me. The theme of the overall arc here is connection. Family, community, culture, generation and location and it is moved with the notion of fluidity (gender, personal identity and more). Rankin, as writer, director and character, wants us to consider the organism of our community and the flow of our lives. The children, in their wild goose quest for a means to free the high value banknote from the ice takes them across town and back from afternoon to night, encounter a cross section of the townsfolk, all of whom have a story or a folky tip to share. Matthew Rankin as character and creator (though this does not stumble into heavy handedness) seeks his familial roots but must intersect with the same kind of undeclared network, even to the extent of connecting with the guide of dowdy civic tours of liminal urban wastes. 

The connections appear and are deftly drawn. The characters are, once knowable as parts of the greater tale, warmly presented. This film wrested my resistance from me the way a grumbling shy kid can be collared into enjoying a party. I thought I would be writing something like Roberto Rossellini makes a Wes Anderson film. Instead, I can report that I was most pleasurably proven wrong.

Viewing notes; I saw this at the Kino in Melbourne on a cold and rainy morning. It felt perfect.