Toronto Hidden Gem Universal Language Director Iranian Cinema-Inspired Comedy

Matthew Rankin’s second function, Common Language, actually echoes the comedian sensibility of fellow Winnipeg filmmaker Man Maddin (The Saddest Music within the World, Rumours). However its fantastical and multilayered construction — meant to pay homage to the Iranian cinema he loves — is tough to elucidate. 

Requested to explain what Common Language is about, Rankin channels his internal Groucho: “It’s about 89 minutes.”

Placing his auteur hat again on, the Montreal-based director provides: “I might describe it as an autobiographical hallucination. It’s about my metropolis, but it surely additionally isn’t. It’s about Iranian cinema, but it surely additionally will not be.” 

Iranian filmmakers, identified for breaking the boundary between realism and surrealism, not least to elude censors and an oppressive Iranian regime, are an ideal mannequin for Rankin to observe along with his personal compulsive illusion-making.

The rhythm and construction of Common Language — the place Persian and French are a reimagined as Canada’s two official languages — could be very a lot dictated by Rankin’s sense of Tehran by the use of his native Winnipeg. Right here he alludes to a Venn diagram, the place overlapping circles reveal a relationship between two or extra objects.

“It isn’t about Iran. It isn’t about Tehran, but it surely is also,” Rankin provides, with the identical surreal overlaps holding true for Winnipeg and Montreal within the satirical comedy. 

An instance of Rankin’s cinematic mashup is how he reimagines a Tim Hortons, the espresso and donuts chain thought-about the final word in Canada, in Common Language as an Arabic tea lounge. Apart from its Farsi-language signage, Rankin’s Timmie’s location has samovars, tiny tea glasses and a younger girl clutching a sugar dice between her tooth as she sips the tea and the sugar melts.

However, in fact, it’s Tim Hortons. So Rankin’s nod to Persian cinema features a diorama on the wall depicting the life and tragic dying of NHL legend Tim Horton. “And so they’re hoisting a Stanley samovar,” or a Stanley Cup within the form of a large samovar, he provides. 

Elsewhere in Common Language, which is debuting on the Toronto Worldwide Movie Pageant, chickens make tracks in snow throughout a Canadian winter, two college students attempt to fish a 500-rial invoice from frozen ice and Rankin’s hometown of Winnipeg is changed into an in any other case drab cross-cultural hybrid. Rankin himself performs a Farsi-speaking Montreal bureaucrat who returns to Winnipeg to see his mom, solely to search out his household altered past recognition.

“These are areas which might be maybe on one stage fairly other than one another, however on this planet of this film, they’ve been blended collectively into this uncommon hybrid,” Rankin explains. 

His movie, which picked up the first-ever viewers award in Cannes’ Administrators’ Fortnight this 12 months, had Rankin casting native Farsi audio system from the Iranian-Canadian group, most of whom are first-time actors with their very own Persian comedian sensibility.

“After they inform a narrative, they’ve a way of timing, a humorousness, a way of drama. So if you happen to write an element you understand they’ll do, that’s aligned to their character, then they are often actually nice. You’re setting them up for fulfillment,” Rankin explains.

Common Language may have its North American premiere on Tuesday, Sept. 10 at Bell Lightbox.