Matthew Rankin’s second feature is something of an anomaly on this year’s International Feature Oscar shortlist. For one thing, it takes place in a world that doesn’t really exist, posing a surreal fusion of East and West that transplants the serious rustic dramas of the Middle East to the bland, snow-covered industrial estates of Winnipeg, Canada. The plot is even harder to describe, involving a turkey who steals glasses, a desperately bored tour guide, and an office worker who leaves his job to visit his mother, all united by the story of two little boys who find a banknote. of buried bench. tantalizingly, on the ice.
It shouldn’t work, but it does, as demonstrated when the film won Rankin an Audience Award after its premiere at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight last year. Here, he tells an important backstory that helps make (more) sense of one of the strangest films of the year…
DEADLINE: This isn’t the usual kind of movie that would make the Oscar shortlist. What did you think when you saw that I had made the cut?
MATTHEW RANKIN: (Laughs.) Well, yes, I’m not a competitive person, I don’t have high expectations from life. My parents really raised me to expect relentless disappointment from the world, so I never set the bar very high. Any hope for the future I might have had as a child was really taken away from me a long time ago. So I find it unbelievable and a little surreal, but it’s also funin the sense that it is a measure of how people connect with the film. It’s an unbelievable movie, it’s true, but that’s what we’re seeing as we show it around the world: people do really connect with it. However abstract and surreal it may be, people feel he. That’s rewarding and really good for the whole team, so let’s see how far we can take this dog and pony show.
DEADLINE: There are so many concepts included in this movie. What was the organizing principle?
CLASSIFICATION: That’s a great question. It’s true, it’s not necessarily a movie where you would tell the story. yes, there is a story, there is a narrative experience, there are characters, but I think the experience is cinematic. I always describe it as a Venn diagram between two spheres: it is the language of Iranian cinema and the language of Canadian cinema merging in a liminal interzone and trying to create a third space. I think that third space is where people connect.
It is the concept of creating, in a very non-didactic and apolitical way, a proximity between spaces between which we could imagine a great distance. I mean, my running joke in Q&As is that Iranian cinema comes from a thousand years of poetry and Canadian cinema comes from 50 years of discount furniture commercials. The concept of putting these two things together is a bit absurd, but it is also our world. It is also the miracle that we are all alive here at the same time. We have this very short period of being alive together, all together at the same time, and that involves all kinds of complexity and absurdity, but also beauty.
I think these bonding spaces are becoming more and more unusual. In many ways, I feel like the film came about the pandemic and its loneliness, and I feel like we’re still reckoning with how pathological that loneliness has become. We see it in our politics, we see it in our social media, how many people have these Berlin walls that just collapsed around us, and opposition paradigms are the way we organize the world now, in a very rigid way. But we create a space that is very fluid, where the spaces that we normally conceive of through oppositional paradigms (in the way we organize and understand them) find this central zone where they simply flow together like a river between all the binaries. There is a certain catharsis in that.
DEADLINE: Why Iranian cinema? Why Iranian culture?
CLASSIFICATION: Well, I would say specifically that it is (referencing) Iranian cinema is more than culture in general, and that’s how it started. I mean, the film moves between subatomic particles of my life and my city, Winnipeg, and into the cosmos. It started with a familiar story. My grandmother told me a story when I was very young and she described her life during the Depression in Winnipeg in the 1930s. She told me a story about how she and her brother found a bill frozen in ice on the street and went on this odyssey. through the city to get him out of the ice and they had to navigate the adult world. They were very poor, it was a two dollar bill, but it would have fed their family for a week.
Anyway, it was a story about the Depression that captured my imagination as a child. Then, much later, when I was a teenager, I entered Iranian cinema in a big way. I had an Iranian friend who took me to see Abbas Kiarostami films. Then I became very obsessed, very deep, and very enthusiastic about the films produced by the Kanoon Institute, the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Youth. They had produced all these films for children, and they were very beautiful, very humanistic, very poetic stories of children facing adult dilemmas. Even in Jafar Panahi’s film The white balloonthe drama is structured around the lost money.
Anyway, in some way there was an echo of the story of my grandmother who, I don’t know, saw a small synapse explode in my brain. There was something very moving to me about the idea that my then octogenarian grandmother, who had always lived in Winnipeg, only spoke English, that she had this story that would find echo in these Iranian films on the other side of the world. . That’s where the beginning of the movie came from. I got excited. I love cinematic language and telling my grandmother’s story through the prism of formalism that I associate with these films.
Then I started working with Pirouz Nemati and Ila Firouzabadi, who are producers and co-writers of the film. We were really excited to do it in Farsi and really expand this concept to a great level. Then it became something else.
Matthew Rankin, director of ‘Common Language’
PR factory
DEADLINE: I have no concept of Winnipeg. What could you tell me about Winnipeg that would shed some light on this film?
CLASSIFICATION: Well, it’s the city I grew up in. I think we always have a complicated relationship with the place where we grew up. It is a city that is in the geographic center of North America, but is very much on the edge of North American society. I mean, there is a Winnipeg that is very conservative, that really wants to fit into the American mainstream and all its lies of success and fame and money, but there is this countercultural Winnipeg, that has always been a part of Winnipeg, that is really defiant and really focused on the idea of ​​challenging the American mainstream.
This produced a series of truly surprising outsider artists; Man Maddin would be the most famous and best known. And I really think Man is the best ambassador for Winnipeg and what it means. A very different film culture has emerged in Winnipeg and you can see a lot of it in our film. It is very focused on surrealism, reusing codes from cinematographic language to tell personal stories. That’s all from Man Maddin, actually. I mean, it reuses the old-fashioned language of 1940s melodramas and silent films to tell these very personal and unique stories.
I would also say that Winnipeg has a great history of weird humor. One of my favorite Winnipeg movies is The big idiot (1985) an animated film by Richard Condie. Now it is a bit forgotten (it was nominated for an Oscar in 1986), but it is a masterpiece. It’s just absolutely absurd and totally pathological, and it was the first movie I remember seeing where I really recognized my city and was able to say, “Those are people I know.” It’s an animated movie, but it really felt like a mirror. The easy answer to your question is that Winnipeg is geographically isolated and therefore becomes a strange, otherworldly place. That’s kind of true, but I think it also has this very punk rock challenge to orthodoxy, which is something that I really, really love.
DEADLINE: How does this film connect to work you’ve done before, such as your debut, The 20th century(2019)And your shorts?
CLASSIFICATION: It’s very different. The first film is a historical film, but it also plays with reality. It is a biographical film of a current person. (former Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King)but his fictions are very, very, very exposed. It’s not a Spielbergian simulacrum where you hide all the artifice and create an image of the past that is so irresistibly believable that you forget you’re watching a movie and think you’re watching the American past. It’s not like that. It really becomes clear how synthetic it is; uses very theatrical sets and involves very absurd and surreal events, which do have a historical argument. But historians have complained, of course, that this is horrible fiction, an abomination. So that’s it, it’s like an alternate history, whereas I think of this movie as an alternate geography.
There are many things in the process that link them. I would say that humor certainly brings the two together in a contemporary way, but, more fundamentally, so does the process. I have a background in history and my previous career was as an academic historian. I’m not an academic at all, but something that always fascinates me is the problem of putting reality into another form. A historian takes the crude chronology of the past and organizes it into a story with a beginning, middle, and ending. Even though they claim to be scientists, there are artistic operations at play even in the writing of history, even in purely text-based history. The problem of capturing history on film is even more interesting. Transforming the truth or something that has a very intimate relationship with reality as we understand it into image and sound is something infinitely stranger.
I am a filmmaker who greatly loves the artifice of cinema. The arc of cinema history has really leaned toward simulacrum and recreating realities to the point that we forget we’re watching a movie. The idea is to get as close to reality as possible, as close to authenticity as possible. But I actually think that the opposite is more interesting, that embracing the artifice of cinema can take us to a further place, to a new place. That’s something both films share; They have a relationship with reality, but they are fed through a prism and you can see the artifice at work.
DEADLINE: What’s next for you? Are you concentrating only on this film or do you have other plans?
CLASSIFICATION: Yes, I do. Yes, my corpse is being shipped to many parts of the world at the moment and I haven’t had much time to mobilize the following things, but I am working on a couple of things. Ila Firouzabadi and I are working on a fictional documentary, partially filmed on the topic of Esperanto. (a man-made international language devised in the 19th century). It’s interesting, there are some real threads that have emerged during the making of this film that are feeding into the next one. In parallel, I am working on an archival film, purely archival, about a conservative Canadian politician, which will be a very experimental film but will nevertheless tell a story about the theme of conservatism, which, of course, is one that we worrying at this moment
DEADLINE: Are you at all concerned that Donald Trump could buy Canada, as he has suggested in the past?
CLASSIFICATION: I heard that. I’m sure I could get a good deal. He’s known for his deals, right?
