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The Best Movie at Cannes This Year Is an Oddball Canadian Comedy

Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language feels warm and familiar even as we realize just how startlingly original it is.

Outside of the festival bubble, they’re all lumped under the general “Cannes” umbrella, but in truth, those of us on the ground are torn morning, noon, and night between the big movies starring famous and famous-ish names (many of which are, to be fair, excellent and noteworthy) and the smaller ones playing in theaters elsewhere on the Croisette. (As one character says, “Just as the Assiniboine joins the Red River and together they turn into Lake Winnipeg, we are all connected, agha.”) Everything feels like it belongs with the otherworldly, twilight atmosphere of the film, one that slips gently from playful, fablelike simplicity to pointed, expressive melancholy. That film (presented by “the Winnipeg Ministry for the Intellectual Guidance of Children and Young People”) was a play on Kiarostami’s 1990 masterpiece Close-Up, which follows an impostor who poses as the famous Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf in order to insinuate himself into the lives of a well-to-do Tehran family.

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