In Paul Schrader’s newest film Oh, Canada (2024), which screened at the Cinéma du musée in the first months of this year, Richard Gere plays Leo Fife, a legendary filmmaker interviewed on his deathbed by two former students. Uma Thurman, the third member of the cohort and now his wife, defends him from their hawkish disregard for his drifting senility. “He doesn’t know what he’s saying,” she protests, as the legendary artist describes fleeing to Canada to dodge the draft; the opportunistic art career that began by chance, and the destructive relationships that followed: the son on whom he turned his back with deliberate brutality.
Shaggy-haired boys drive vintage cars down country laneways in autumnal Vermont. On the soundtrack, Phosphorescent cloys a psychedelic pastiche of Neil Young. This gaudy veneer is the nostalgic refraction of an unreliable narrator, and gives the film an angle on its unlikable protagonist. “Canada” becomes a symbol of false naïveté in the internal construct Fife uses to justify a lifetime of cowardice. Schrader, nearly eighty years old, boils down narrative, image, and theme to the bare minimum. National identity is just one dab from a palette of primary colours. Schrader is not interested in exploring Canadian identity, but uses the nation’s conventional image of sickly sweetness: toxic Canadiana.
Oh, Canada premiered at the 77th Festival de Cannes on May 17, 2024. The next day, Universal Language had its debut in the Directors’ Fortnight section. There are no primary colours in Matthew Rankin’s film. Everything has been tinted to the same grade, and Canadian identity is the unifying hue. Wheaty yellow and a permanently-dated turquoise. Winnipeg is re-imagined as Brutalist Tehran. Two children embark on a quest to extricate some money from a patch of ice. Montréal is the interior of an office, a hollow-cheeked pharmacist who intones “life is worth living” without conviction. Pebbled concrete fills every frame to such a degree that the repetitious rhythm threatens to suffocate. Just then, a sliver of overcast sky gives us room to breathe. Montage sequences puncture the image, each one a gust of fresh air amidst the characters running back-and-forth between interiors and locked-down frames.
A character drops an idiosyncratic mobile phone into the trashcan. The most modern elements that I could spot were some of the cars in the background of the freeway shots. Denis Villeneuve pinned the inciting incident of Enemy (2013) on a video store that rents VHS tapes. (For younger readers: by 2013, Blu-ray had already won the war of DVD’s succession.) Canadian cinema represents itself in an ambiguous period because the reality of our nation is that we are stuck somewhere between true backwardness, and full commitment to the onrushing Now! of the Contemporary. This ambiguous setting, however, functions as a form of self-deprecation. In a new era of military and trade war, with threats of annexation and tariffs, the de-fanged image of Canada perpetuates a bloodless stereotype far from the reality of this nation.
Universal Language takes place in a fantasy-land where dream logic is the Law of Nature. Its rhythm is paced such that the climax coincides with another gauzy montage that breaks down into pure symbolism. Brazil (1985) employs a similar surreal, Brutalist fantasy aesthetic (albeit more retro-futuristic than techno-nostalgic), but is not subject to the pitfalls endemic to CanCon. British humour can be self-deprecating while still resting confident on the laurels of centuries of Old Blighty’s war crimes, terror, and colonial incursions. Canada is as evil an empire as any other, but it never enjoyed the hegemony of the UK or the US. When our cultural leaders engage in self-effacement, it does not come off as the humble nobility of a confident master, but rather as the ressentiment of slave mentality. The late master of surrealism, David Lynch, knew very well that dreams and nightmares come from the same place. His symbolic language always managed to pivot deeper into what writhes beneath the surface. Universal Language has no nightmare imagery in its lexicon. There is no edge, no bite, just a false naïveté that obscures a heart as dark as any other.
Meanwhile, the film benefits from the full strength of our nationally-funded distribution and marketing. In Montréal, the film has screened in all our arthouses for months on end; internationally, it enjoys critical acclaim, has won awards, and is making lists of best films of 2024. The film is technically assured, masterfully composed, but the aspect most relevant to the Contemporary is the use of autofiction. The character who dumps phone, wallet, and keys in the trash, and who abandons Québec to return home to Manitoba, is named Matthew Rankin and is played by writer–director Matthew Rankin (a Winnipegger who lives in Montréal). Autofiction flourishes in an era where audiences have become tired of fictive structures, and who instead expect an invitation behind the curtain, there to be shown how the gears of artistic craft have been set in motion. However, there is a key element of the genre that Rankin has missed, and that is the element of risk.
As I was drafting this review, news broke of a lawsuit brought against Paul Schrader by a former assistant. Jane Doe alleges that Schrader sexually assaulted her in May 2024, at the 77th Festival de Cannes. News as unpleasant as it is unsurprising. Universal Language and Oh, Canada are wildly different films, but both trade on a deceptively similar conception of the Canada that lives in the global imaginary—but while the American film takes that image as given, the Canadian film is culpable for perpetuating that image from the inside. Schrader’s oeuvre has consistently delved into the darkest corners of American life, and now it is confirmed that the man himself inhabits the same moral realm as his work. Rankin, the pride of our nation, has created a narrative that moves between two realms of myth: the myth of surrealism, with its implied access to the transcendental unconscious; and the self-generated myth of the artist-as-individual. He has entirely passed over the garden of earthly delights. Universal Language effaces the vulgar reality of our nation, while simultaneously also undercutting his particularity as an individual.
Autofiction is implicated in the supply and demand of Contemporary narcissism (as a dabbler in autofiction, I say this without judgement)—but like other works in the canon produced by liberals, he has followed a line of flight straight into the wild blue yonder. In the meta-text of Oh, Canada, the film operates as a confession. Whatever we think of Schrader, of this or any other of his films, the man has put his soul on the line. Rankin takes the safe route and falsely represents both self and nation as innocent and naïve.
War, uncertainty, and threats to our sovereignty might provoke us to assume a defensive posture and begin to identify with a nation from which we previously had the complacent luxury of distance. We might feel pressure to vote for “the lesser evil.” Canada’s national identity is uniquely weak and ambivalent because this country is a uniquely artificial construct. From its initial settlement and governance by a fur-trapping company, to its modern institution as a constitutional monarchy, Canada has always had more in common with a corporation than a nation. Universal Language plays into the worst aspects of the Canadian stereotype, but it does contain a relevant insight: the whole experiment is completely arbitrary, and the Tim Horton’s sign might as well be in Farsi as it was in English.