Courtesy of New York Film Festival
Universal Language opens with a spectacle of hilarious inappropriateness.
In a classroom in a fantastical Winnipeg where residents speak both French and Arabic, teacher Iraj Bilodeau (Mani Soleymanlou) enters late to find his students misbehaving. With comical fury, he lambastes these “creatures” for their conduct and, once the lesson begins, continues his censure on an individual basis, be it directed at a boy dressed as Groucho Marx (“Your face is disgusting to others. Go stand in the closet”) or Omid (Sobhan Javadi), who has “below-average intelligence,” is “blind as a bat,” and whose excuse for not having his glasses is that they were stolen by a wild turkey.
Hearing their ambitions for the future, Iraj proclaims that there’s no hope for human survival and that “all of you will fail” before having them read a sentence on the blackboard: “We are lost forever in this world.” Then, he expels them all until Omid recovers his spectacles, declaring, “No more education. Everyone go stand in the closet!”
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