Matthew Rankin’s Iranian Cinema Homage

Newsflash: Iran has invaded the sleepy Canadian metropolis of Winnipeg. Correction: Iranian cinema has truly invaded Winnipeg. And much more particularly: Two Iranian films that launched the nation onto the worldwide movie scene, Abbas Kiarostami’s The place Is the Good friend’s Home? (1987) and Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon (1995), have in some way discovered their method into the capital of Manitoba.

What precisely they’re doing there’s by no means defined. Neither is it actually the purpose of director Matthew Rankin’s weird and enchanting experimental comedy Common Language, which picked up the first-ever viewers award in Cannes’ Administrators’ Fortnight. Starring the director himself alongside a solid of Farsi-speaking locals each younger and previous, the movie is fairly onerous to explain on paper, however let’s give it a shot.

We’re in snow-covered Winnipeg, which half-resembles the drab, midsized Canadian metropolis, and half appears like a neigborhood someplace in Tehran — not present-day Tehran, however Tehran circa the Eighties and 90s. The signage is all in Farsi, there’s an out of doors market connected to an industrial warehouse the place you should purchase previous typewriters or vacuum cleaners, chickens are wandering round within the snow, and the native department of Tim Horton’s serves donuts and Persian specialties. What the hell is occurring right here?

You don’t need to be a significant fan of the aforementioned Iranian classics — which this critic positively is — to acknowledge Rankin’s homages to them all through Common Language, nevertheless it helps. The movie’s opening, set in a classroom the place a instructor (Mani Soleymanlou) scolds his college students in a mixture of Farsi and French, is straight out of Good friend’s Home, as are a bunch of different sequences. A type of college students (Saba Vahedyousefi) finds a 500 Rial invoice frozen within the ice, enlisting a college good friend (Rojina Esmaelli) to assist fish it out — which is precisely the plot of Panahi’s The White Balloon, ice however.

Rankin’s characteristic debut, The Twentieth Century, was already a homage to previous films, recreating Hollywood Golden Age musicals by the use of the frenzied retro montages of Man Maddin (like Rankin, a local Winnipegger).

The type in Common Language is worlds aside from that movie. Cinematographer Isabelle Stachtchenko mimics the grainy, static 16mm look of Kiarostami’s early work, which was funded by Iran’s Institute for Mental Growth of Youngsters and Younger Adults (whose brand Rankin even copies within the opening credit). Set designer Louisa Schabas inserts Farsi promoting wherever she will, whether or not on park benches, shopping center billboards, native TV commercials or by reworking the unique Tim Horton’s brand acquainted to each Canadian.

Some peole will get pleasure from Common Language simply by sifting by way of all these unusual particulars, however Rankin additionally features a minimalist plot the place he performs a neighborhood, additionally named Matthew Rankin, arriving again in Winnipeg after residing for years in Montreal.

When he calls his mom on the cellphone earlier than visiting, a person named Massoud (Pirouz Nemati) picks up, and it turns into clear that he’s taken Matthew’s place. So right here we’re in one more Kiarostami movie, the 1990 masterpiece Shut-Up, a few younger man who assumed the id of director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, infiltrating a household till he was discovered.

Rankin by no means takes issues fairly that far right here, and his new movie is far much less of a drama than a unusual, deadpan comedy with a couple of standout moments — equivalent to a scene the place Massoud provides a tour of a miserable Winnipeg mall fountain as if he had been presenting some sort of main revolutionary monument.

By changing his drab hometown into an unique land full of nostalgia (albeit a really area of interest nostalgia, primarily for Criterion Channel subscribers), Rankin appears to be looking for out the common language of cinema itself. In his personal very bizarre method he manages to seek out it, turning an on a regular basis place into one thing momentarily particular — which is what all good films are purported to do.