A Language of Strange Cities: Universal Language

On one late-winter weekend night to spare, I found myself in a barely half-filled theater at the Angelika Film Center, a small chain between NoHo and SoHo known for showing indies and foreign films. I hadn’t the faintest idea what I had bought tickets for, nor did I particularly care. The chill of the New York night still lingered, but I was wrapped in the warmth of a seat that had surely outlasted generations of cinephiles. I drifted in and out of shallow dreams, my eyelids heavy as the film’s strange plot unspooled across the screen.

Matthew Rankin’s 2024 film Universal Language is a cinematic triptych in which three distinct stories unfold linearly in a city that merges the landscapes of Winnipeg, Canada, and Tehran, Iran. Although the snow-laden background and the brutalist North American architecture point to this being the Winnipeg that we know, this Winnipeg is infused with a uniquely Persian aesthetic. A Tim Hortons location is depicted as an Iranian teahouse where tea is served from samovars, while characters speak both Farsi and French as they collectively beat the Manitoban cold. The film also integrates different time periods of very different cities with different histories. An abandoned ‘90s American-style shopping mall houses murals that resemble Iranian Revolution-era propaganda, while the characters are all clothed in ‘80s ski gear as a modern Ford Fiesta drives along a highway behind. Altogether, Rankin creates a quasi-fictional city that lacks a clear cultural identity, but that speaks for its own sort of “universality.”

Throughout the film, one story follows two sisters who discover a large banknote frozen in the ice and embark on a journey to recover it, hoping to use the money to buy a classmate a new pair of glasses. (His old pair was stolen by a turkey.) In another, a weary tour guide escorts a group of indifferent tourists through the drab landmarks of Winnipeg. These grey “landmarks” include strangely distinctive locations, anything from the site of “The Great Parallel Parking Incident of 1958,” or the UNESCO-designated site where an abandoned briefcase was never moved. The final story brings Rankin himself into the frame, as he steps into the role of Matthew, a man returning home to visit his unwell mother. He is constantly troubled by a feeling of having been forgotten; his mediocre job in another faraway city has detached him from his memories at home, to the point that he suspects that someone else may have taken over his role as son to his mother, whose memories are fading away.

The film smoothly flows from one story to the next. The plot is initially starkly tripartite, but they eventually merge into one as the boundaries between the characters also slowly merge together. Rankin presents a unique setting that blends familiarity with strangeness, differing cultures with time periods and humor with absurdism.

It is not simply the visual appeal or the playful satire that makes this film memorable. While Rankin situates the three stories in a Tehran-like Winnipeg, this setting is not essential to the narratives themselves. What proves more significant than the cultural specificity of these two cities and cultures is the fluidity with which Rankin weaves together the strangeness of his characters, settings, and plots. The abrupt and absurd, seemingly nonsensical plots scattered throughout the film nevertheless cohere in this city, undermining the long-held assumption that coherence must rest on strict logical order. Rankin suggests that randomness, when carefully shaped through cinema, may offer the most authentic philosophical representation of our worlds, wherever we are, and in whatever time we live. For me, this fluidity seems to allow the film to operate as a genuinely “universal” work.

As much as Rankin’s Universal Language derives its universality from hermeneutical fluidity, it also offers a meaningful cultural statement. At first glance, one might assume the film depicts a fictional Winnipeg in which Iranian immigration has entirely reshaped the identity of a Canadian city. Rankin, however, avoids presenting the setting as one where a particular culture has assimilated or subjugated another. Instead, the film detaches itself from time, place, and cultural hierarchies, proposing a world where two cultures have merged comically and peacefully into an equal whole. In doing so, Rankin allows the fluidity of his plots free rein within a fictional cultural community in its own right.

We often dwell on one side of our own cultural identity while imagining the other as foreign. In such moments, we may feel like impostors, caught between worlds where our identities do not fully belong. Universal Language, nevertheless, demonstrates that oddities and clashes can converge into a unified whole, creating strange cities wherein anyone can belong.

Perhaps this is my overanalysis of what could be seen as mere comedy or pure art. After all, the film brims with hilarious jokes and beautiful cinematography, which may be more than enough without any hidden philosophies or cultural critique. Yet, Rankin’s film hints at something more: a cinematic space of belonging, even when Winnipeg and Tehran remain distant from wherever one happens to be watching this film.

Yongjae Kim is a junior at Columbia studying philosophy and political science.

@yjk_216