Une langue universelle

The Turkey’s Song / یک زبان جهانی

کیه کیه در می‌زنه من دلم می‌لرزه_{!
درو با لنگر می‌زنه من دلم می‌لرزه...
«Who is it knocking at the door? my heart trembles/ who is it knocking so intensely? my heart trembles…»
From the song “who is knocking?”, sung by Pouran}

_{«arrange for me to be able to speak with you»
Maurice Blanchot, L’attente, L’oubli}

Matthew Rankin and his friends have artfully made that possible. They arranged for Turkeys to sing to us, for citizens of this small Canadian town of Winnipeg to re-emerge as an amalgam of Persian speaking and French speaking people. They also arranged for their different histories to meet and flow into each one another at both personal and interpersonal levels. Matthew Rankin’s Une langue universelle is a meticulous and original fabric of transculturality.

Diaspora, cinema homages, resisting language: Three threads

Let us begin with Iran: Canada has the second largest community of Iranians in the diaspora. There are around 400.000 Iranians in Canada. This is about forty percent of said diaspora’s population. For my generation, born in the 1980s, migration was an obvious eventuality of any educated middle-class person. Today, migration seems even more necessary and urgent, as the country becomes increasingly environmentally, socially, economically and politically unliveable. The first destination was and still is Canada, a country where it seems that origin, colour, language, Homeland, Herkunft and all those essences neither matter nor even exist. This is the first thread: most Iranians want to immigrate to Canada and Canada seems to offer them a suitable new home.

There is a second Iran-related thread. For decades now – and for various reasons that are both economic and market-related, but also socio-political and related to the politics of language and translation – Iranian contemporary literature and poetry, and presumably in terms of scale other art forms, have not seen the success that Iranian cinema has. Filmmakers such as Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi, Bahram Beyza’ie, Rakhshan Banietemad, and Asghar Farhadi among others have been painting the image of the Iranian cinema as prominent, original and avant-garde in the world. Une langue universelle is explicitly placed within this tradition of cinema. The opening logo itself demonstrates this to us: a production of Kanoon – Winnipeg branch. This would bring a smile to the faces of all those who know Kanoon and Kiarostami. To make a long story short, Kanoon – Centre for the Intellectual Development of Children and Adolescents – was founded in 1965 and attracted many progressive filmmakers, graphists and artists, including Abbas Kiarostami, who made many of his short movies and one of his first chefs-d’oeuvres, Where is the Friend’s House? (1983, third of the so-called Koker Trilogy) in Kanoon. The latter movie is especially related to Une langue universelle as Kiarostami deals with the Odyssey of a small school boy – Babak  Ahmadpour – searching for his friend’s house in order to return his taken-in-error notebook to him. Like many of Kiarostami’s movies, Rankin’s movie also largely deals with children’s stories in a world of adult troubles. Besides this movie, there are numerous references to many other chefs-d’oeuvre of Iranian cinema, including The Report (1977), Close-Up (1990) and The Taste of Cherry (1997) by Kiarostami, The Circle (2000) by Jafar Panahi, The Mother (1990) by Ali Hatami, and more. In this sense, the movie could be seen as an homage to Iranian cinema and its visual language.

The third and last thread is simultaneously related and unrelated to Iran. Almost all migrants need to learn the language of their destination country in order to integrate into the new culture. We can note in the etymology of this verb, to integrate, its original meaning: to be uniform, untouched, and indistinguishable. Migration is an experience of departing from your language and never coming back to that same language, an experience of forgetting it or speaking it differently, mixing it with new languages and transforming it. In the case of Persian, it has unfortunately been for the most part an experience of being forgotten, with the exception of a few voices speaking it in literature and poetry. Reza Baraheni was an example. Arrange for me to be able to speak with you. Language needs to talk, but not to itself: with someone else. It seems extremely superficial, but this Speaking of language needs an interlocutor. Farsi does not have many in the diaspora.

The migrating turkey as universal sphynx

We can imagine these three threads as the warp of this fabric and look for some weft in it. Said weft being Canadian. In his interview on the film, Matthew Rankin explains that the film is deeply personal, based on various parts of both his own life and those of others around him. He remembers when his grandmother told him a story about her own childhood during the Great Depression when she and her younger sister found a two dollar note and went on an Odyssey, with a homeless guy, around their town to use the money, and tells us also about his father’s passion for Winnipeg as a wonderful town. There are references to a prominent Québécois movie theme, where a solitary man sets off on a lonely journey towards nothingness, again underlined by Rankin in his interviews. He tells us that when he first watched Where is the Friend’s House, he was reminded of his grandmother’s story – we find the same Odyssey in Jafar Panahi’s movie The Circle, amid other movies – and that Close-up by Kiarostami is correspondingly present as the character of Matthew in the movie. There is indeed an important analogy between the two movies here: Kiarostami’s Close-up follows the trial of Mr. Sabzian, a big fan of famous Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who has posed as Makhmalbaf himself and is subsequently arrested and imprisoned. In a very similar way in Rankin’s movie Masoud poses as Matthew for years, taking care of (?) and living with his mother. However, beyond these similarities, how then do the warp and weft fit together?

The key for me is the double title of the movie. In French, the movie is called Une langue universelle (A universal language) and in Persian it is called آواز بوقلمون, which could be translated to The Turkey’s Song. The turkey is a strange bird indeed, called in English the name of a country! As if we would call “cat” in English “Iran”. That being said, in the country of Turkey itself, it is called هیندوشکا, “hindushka”, so this even goes as far as India. It seems that the turkey is the perfect linguistic and cultural migrant bird, moving between cultures, taking one country’s name to the next, a trans-cultural bird, a hybrid, heterogeneous creature of universality. Comprised of so many particularities, it is the linguistic universal Sphinx.

Arrange for me to be able to speak with you.

More than ordinary universality: Care and humour

This arrangement happens through a fabric interwoven with the afore-mentioned threads of Iran and a Canadian’s personal experiences in this universal song of the turkey. So far, if the movie was neat dialogue of those aspects of Iranian cinema, with culture and language on one hand and this personal Canadian experience on the other in order to give us a message analogous to “yes, we all share one world”, it wouldn’t have done much to become an extra-ordinary film and experience. What is this extra of Une langue universelle? I would like to suggest that there are two wonderful extras to this movie that take it beyond ordinary cultural exchange.

Firstly, there is the visual language of the movie: an extremely beige town – grey as well – is Winnipeg. Rankin mentions that in this respect it very much resembles Tehran, and he is right. Moreover, it does not look like a town where different public spaces are somehow organically blended through parks, greeneries and such. Instead everything is, in some way or another, separated: highways, residential buildings, spaces with no greenery or water – again, very much like Tehran – and shops which seem to be artificially inserted into huge blocks of cement. There is a strong surreal artificiality to the urbanism of the movie, reminiscent of Roy Andersson’s spaces or Edward Hopper’s paintings.

However, within this neutral, almost uniform and universalizing urbanism, individuals are extremely particular, their lives colourful and vivacious, vibrating with colours and songs of Pouran (the pre-revolutionary Iranian pop and classical singer), full of individual and singular cares and concerns. Care is found in a florists’ passion for a saffron flower, the warmth of a little family life and a typical Iranian household’s grandmother’s table, an animated and funny Turkey butcher, a humorous cake seller with a Gilaki accent, and so on.

Moreover, a fascinating linguistic game is at play here. Rankin mentions in his interviews that, except for three of them, the actors and actresses are not professionals but mostly people who surround him, his friends, and mostly Iranian. The hybridity of his life is brought into a beautifully mixed trans-linguistic level, where typical Canadian shops, adverts and even English words are written in Persian alphabet. This is also where this Canadian man, Matthew, speaks in Persian with his mother, and the Iranian children attend an “immersion French” course while speaking strongly accented Persian. It is this contrast between, on the one hand, neutral public spaces and intimate individuals, internal spaces and private ones, and the total mixture of two languages at every possible level on the other that gives an extra element to this personal narrative, narrated through an impersonal universal cinematic form.

Secondly, the extra in the ordinary transculturality happens in the subtle and refined humour present in every aspect of the movie. One of the nexus of this humour is language itself: everything, from shops’ names and names of places to adverts are written in Persian but still bear their English or French proper names. For instance, on a bench where a suitcase was left years ago – and is now listed in UNESCO’s cultural heritage – we read بیل نوری، به او رای دهید: “Vote for Bill Nouri”. Written in Persian, the name Bill Nouri could mean “light shovel” or “light-emanating shovel” (bill: shovel, nour: light). As a Persian speaking spectator, of course, you find the word game funny, and this humour extends to the desperate school teacher’s rhetoric, valorising his playing of electric guitar, school kids’ behaviour and their choice of future jobs, the lady on the bus sitting next to a medal winning turkey and so on. Visual and linguistic humour not only take the movie beyond an ordinary transcultural dialogue but also into the midst of the protagonist’s personal journey back home, Matthew, the Odyssey of two kids trying to help their family, a struggling man with three jobs. Humour binds them together beyond and over their internal dramas.

Lost in references: Beyond identity

I mentioned earlier the richness of references to Iranian cinema and even at this level Une langue universelle is extraordinary. One cannot but find such references. From the Odyssey of the children to a ticket seller drinking a typical Canada Dry found also in key scenes in Panahi’s The Circle, from a son’s return journey to his mother to a man posing for another and so on, the movie is filled with such allusions. It indeed invites us to play this game of references yet soon forces us to abandon it. The sense of the movie – both as meaning and direction – is once again not to be found in its intimations of the history of Iranian and Canadian cinema, but beyond it.

As we discover these references we are also not entirely sure about many of them: is the protagonist in Close-up or in The Taste of Cherry trying to commit suicide? What does he have in common with Kiarostami’s protagonist in The Report when, in the last scene, he visits Masoud/Matthew’s house? Appearances and micro-stories in Une langue universelle lead us to references, show us metaphors and immediately break up with them, building their own metaphors, leading us elsewhere. They lead us to a mother lost in a frozen past, to memories of a town and to the remembering of them. To memories we share through the lives we only partially share, and mostly live quite differently.

The last word: On the school’s blackboard the teacher writes «nous sommes à jamais perdu dans ce monde»: we are forever lost in this world. If this world is the world of authenticity of references, direct symbolism and cultural dualities, between and inside which we are to find any sense, meaning and direction, then we are indeed forever lost. In view of the fact that in such a world of direct symbols, transparent identities and dialogues initiated from our enrootedness in our language, authentic cultural symbols, metaphors and personal stories, we will never encounter the Other, not concretely and freely. In such a world we will be lost. However, in the “Matthew Rankin and his friends”-verse, we are invited to go beyond overt suggestions to an intimate encounter of others. We are taken to our mixed, ambiguous human exchanges where even language loses its common use of transferring meanings through signs, becoming a living, ambiguous, ongoing process of intimate signifying. In such a world, in the place of tragedy, we find comedy and humour saving us from the feeling of being lost and drowned in our personal dramas.