‘Universal Language’ Review: If Tehran Were Winnipeg

The jokes I most enjoy are very specific, aimed at some tiny cross section of people who possess a peculiar shared set of reference points. Sure, broadly crowd-pleasing comedy is a hoot. But when you sense something is funny because it was made for you, and so there are other people like you, too — that’s one of the best feelings art can provoke.

“Universal Language,” directed by Matthew Rankin, is a gently funny, gently moving, slightly surrealist little comedy that’s aimed at two groups of people: Canadians, specifically but not exclusively those who know Winnipeg, and aficionados of Iranian cinema. Surely there’s overlap between the two circles in that Venn diagram, but I can’t imagine it’s all that substantial. Combining the two cultural specificities, though, makes for something fresh and weird and delightful to watch — even if, like me, you’re not an expert on either one.

Even before the movie begins, onscreen text proclaims that this is “A Presentation of the Winnipeg Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young People.” No such agency exists: It’s a sly wink at cinephiles, who may know that a similar institute — the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults — produced some of the classic Iranian films in the 1970s and ’80s, including some early children’s films from the celebrated director Abbas Kiarostami. Rankin even uses a logo for his fictitious institute that looks suspiciously like the Iranian one.

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 Canadian 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.