You certainly don’t need to be from Winnipeg to get a lot of the fun that “Universal Language” is having with an obviously alternate version of the capital of Manitoba. But for those who are from that corner of the Great White North, or particularly studied Guy Maddin devotees — and director Matthew Rankin is both — there are particular gifts much sweeter than an ice-cream cone in winter dotted throughout his film.
In “Universal Language,” two girls look for the means to liberate a huge bill frozen in ice; an intrepid tour guide leads a bewildered group around the landmarks of the city; and a dispirited government employee travels back to Winnipeg to visit his mother. The point isn’t that the stories eventually intersect, although they do. It’s that every overlapping moment gives Rankin and his collaborators room to play with the essential artifice of cinema; and for some of that artifice, the “Universal Language” team drew on what films shot in Winnipeg do best. It is, Rankin said, the greatest producer of Christmas movies in the world.
“I think something like 3,000 Hallmark movies are produced in Winnipeg per year or something like that, but they shoot most of them in the height of summer,” Rankin told IndieWire on an episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “And of course what that means is it only needs to be Christmas inside the frame. Outside the frame, it can be a beautiful summer day — [and] that’s the essence of any film we ever make.”
The “Universal Language” team also needed what lives in the frame to feel like it’s been blighted by a chill wind and like snow has been sitting frozen for a while. So not only did they lean on Winnipeg’s expertise in creating the right amount of fake winter within the frame, they took it as a springboard to explore the film’s artificiality. Things that movies “shouldn’t” do, that draw attention to their construction, were things that Rankin wanted to try and that he saw as something that united his influences, from Winnipeg’s own Guy Maddin to the Iranian Kanoon filmmakers.
Maybe one of the most notable examples is a scene in which the former government employee (Rankin) leaves his job. The camera jumps from his conversation with a bureaucrat to a man crying in his cubicle and back again, in a way that breaks the 180-degree rule, which requires cameras to stay on one side of an imaginary line drawn between two subjects in a scene.
“The ‘crossing the line’ in the bureaucrat scene is defiant of every film school rule — and even some film bros have been like, ‘Oh you can’t do that. That’s wrong.’ But it becomes a joke. It’s funny, and it does tell you that you’re in a movie,” Rankin said. “And I think that’s kind of good. I feel like we are exploring the expressive power of that.”
Whether it comes to crossing the line, switching the cast, or building compositions and settings that are so absurd as to draw attention to their own construction, Rankin and his team wanted to use cinematic tools to build emotional abstractions, not a simulacrum of our own world.
“I feel like the tyranny of the simulacrum is maybe — I feel like that’s even moving to artificial intelligence at this point. It’s kind of like what happened to painting when the photograph was invented,” Rankin said. “Paint was no longer beholden to the tyranny of authenticity. It could be paint and we could explore the expressive potential of that. And I feel like that’s something we can do with cinema.”
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