It's not unusual for a city to double for another metropolis in movies. New Yorkers have long been able to spot when Toronto has been substituted for the Big Apple. Matthew Rankin, though, has gone more than a step, or maybe 85 steps, further.

His "Universal Language" takes place in Winnipeg, Manitoba, but the culture is entirely Iranian. Farsi is the spoken tongue. At Tim Hortons, tea is served from samovars. It's as if we've been knocked over the head and woken up in some snowy, Canadian version of an Abbas Kiarostami film.

And in Rankin's surreal and enchantingly discombobulating film, that's more or less the case. No reason is ever stated for the strange, deadpan fusion of Winnipeg reality and Iranian New Wave cinema. But there's that title. If cinema is a universal language, it's never been more elastically employed, bridging worlds 6,000 miles apart for a singular kind of movie dream, like what Rankin might have spun in his head while drifting off to sleep on a Manitoba winter night while Kiarostami's "Where Is the Friend's House?" played on TV.

It's both an extremely exact homage to the films of Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi and other Iranian masters, and a comic lament for how distant their movies might feel for a Winnipegian director. Rankin has joked that "Universal Language" brings together the rich poetry of Iranian filmmaking and a Canadian cinema that emerged "out of 50 years of discount furniture commercials."

The gags start immediately, with an opening title logo for "A Presentation of the Winnipeg Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young People" — a twist on the Iranian institute that produced '70s classics, like Kiarostami's Koker trilogy.

Like those films, Rankin's is framed with kids. In... Read More