Eccentric movie too full of in-jokes to be truly universal
★★½
(G) 89 minutes
Selected cinemas from May 22
The idea of cinema as a universal language originally took root in the era of silent film, when it was hoped that this newly invented art form would allow communication across cultures as never before, perhaps even helping to bring about world peace.
Universal Language, the eccentric second feature by Canadian director Matthew Rankin, renews this dream after its own fashion, unfolding in the hypothetical country that would be brought into existence if Canada and Iran were superimposed on each other.
But Rankin's title can also be understood ironically, since the upshot is a film that almost any viewer, regardless of background, is liable to find disconcerting and alien.
Rankin's interest in Iran is not a passing fancy. Most of the film's action takes place on the snowy streets of Winnipeg, but the majority of the dialogue is in Persian, with the rest in French (the screenplay was written with two Iranian collaborators, Ila Firouzabadi and Pirouz Nemati, who appear on camera).
Special tribute is paid throughout to the most celebrated of all Iranian filmmakers, the late Abbas Kiarostami, whose hallmarks include long takes and extreme wide shots, the use of non-professional actors, including children, and outwardly trivial plots with multiple levels of meaning.
One of several subplots here involves a couple of schoolgirls (Rojina Esmaeili and Saba Vahedyousefi) who happen upon a banknote frozen in ice – a premise reportedly taken from an anecdote told by Rankin's grandmother, but also an echo of the struggle to retrieve a banknote which falls down a drain at the climax of Jafar Panahi's The White Balloon, which Kiarostami scripted.
Kiarostami's Where Is the Friend's House? is another touchstone, including in a subplot featuring Rankin himself as a government employee who returns home to Winnipeg in search of his mother.
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Sydney Morning Herald
14 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
His album was finished. Then he scrapped it and made a new one in 12 days
Mac DeMarco has been digging a well. This is not some poetic metaphor, like Mac's own Chamber of Reflection. Before jumping on our interview, the Canadian indie rocker was out on his new property, a farmhouse on an island off British Columbia that he shares with his partner Kiera McNally, digging a literal well. Or, to be specific, he was building a well? A house for his well? Look, I'm not a carpenter. 'It's a well enclosure. It looks like an outhouse, but it's made of cedar and it's beautiful,' DeMarco, 35, explains, appearing on Zoom like a gap-toothed storm cloud: grey shirt, grey hat, scraggly beard. 'My uncle and cousin came over and were like, 'You know you have to be able to lift it off if they have to pull the deep well out?' So my day has consisted of taking off the siding and finding where the fastener bolts are to the foundation and removing them. It's good because the stress of 'If my well explodes, will we be able to get it out?' was a lot, but I'm also dismantling the nicest looking thing I've ever built so it's been tough.' I don't understand a word he's saying but Mac DeMarco, DIY tradesman, isn't an odd image to conjure. He's been DIYing, in a musical sense, since his 2012 debut, 2, the album that first launched DeMarco's persona as the ' loveable laid-back prince of indie-rock '. His new album, Guitar, was DIYed to a freakish degree – songs, cover art, even videos – and written and recorded in 12 days. 'I'd wake up in the morning and get a song going, or maybe I'd write it the night before,' he says. 'It was quick and easy, and it feels good. When I leave something for too long and try to come back to it, it doesn't feel right, like I'm already onto something else.' Guitar, an album title so bland it feels like a troll, is DeMarco's first proper album since 2019's Here Comes the Cowboy, which debuted in the top 10 on the Billboard 200, an unlikely scenario for such a stridently independent artist. In 2023, years after the album's release, the track Heart to Heart went viral on TikTok and became DeMarco's first song to break into the Billboard Hot 100. After years watching his cult of personality grow, this was tangible evidence of his pop star reach. But DeMarco's not buying it. 'I don't think Here Comes the Cowboy was that big and the top 10 thing, I don't think it was based off some kind of top of the mountain sales,' he says. 'There's ways to pump that stuff up. We had a big tour around then too, so you sell concert tickets and then if you give a vinyl for each concert ticket, it counts as a sale.' It sounds like he doesn't quite trust his own album's success. 'I like that record, but… yeah, maybe I don't trust the success of it,' DeMarco laughs. 'I just think it's funny that the music industry heralds things like that. They're like, you charted. And it's like, so? 'It's like the metrics on Spotify: these artists can have a bajillion listeners, and then nobody comes to the show,' he continues. 'When Heart to Heart charted in the Hot 100, it didn't even get high – it went to 80-something – but everyone was like, 'Oh my god!'. [Distributors] were telling me we should advertise more to keep it going.' He mocks disgust. 'This album came out five years ago and we didn't even do anything to make the song go crazy, so why not just leave it alone, you know?' It's fair to posit that DeMarco – who has run his own indie, Mac's Record Label, since 2018 – has little sympathy for major labels scrambling amid the music industry's new world order. 'TikTok is confusing for a lot of them. But, at the same time, a lot of the big record labels have figured out how to squeeze the lemon. They want to make it seem like they don't know, but they know.' He chuckles at his own cynicism. 'Maybe I'm just a music industry conspiracy theorist. Whatever. It's cute. You chart on this thing, it's cute. I have these gold records now, they're all in my basement. I don't know what to do with them, but it's cool. Amazing.' I've never had an artist work so hard to dissuade me against their own sales triumphs, but such is DeMarco's mission. Numbers? These things don't interest him. So little that he followed his biggest pop success with an album made entirely of instrumental compositions (2023's Five Easy Hot Dogs) and then a monumental 199-track data dump named for Canadian legend Wayne Gretzky (One Wayne G). You ask DeMarco why, he answers why not. 'I know with One Wayne G, some music journalists were like, 'Is this a middle finger? What's he doing?' but it was nothing like that. I just wanted to share music. I wasn't saying 'Listen to the whole thing!'. I don't care if people listen to none of it. It's there if you want it,' says DeMarco. As an oddity – inspired by his Japanese avant-pop idols Ryuichi Sakamoto and Haruomi Hosono, and partly a comment on how we consume music – he's proud of it. 'It's so long that it won't fit on a CD. You could put it out on a 15-record box set, but that's ridiculous. The only medium it'd work on is a Blu-Ray, but I don't even have a way to play a Blu-Ray. I think One Wayne G might be the coolest thing I ever do. The whole thing was just an experiment in, why?' 'I have these gold records now, they're all in my basement. I don't know what to do with them.' Before he recorded Guitar, DeMarco had completed another album titled Hear the Music, which he scrapped. 'I liked the songs, but that was me turning on the faucet or cleaning out the songwriting pipes,' he says. 'I had maybe 14 songs, I demoed them, tried to do master recordings, but I got lost in the sauce. I started trying to change the drum sound every day. I was building isolation tents in the studio. I built a hut out of PVC pipe. I did vocal takes over and over. I went completely nuts.' He's had this problem before, ever since he stopped recording onto tape with 2015's Another One. He'll go into 'an OCD zone', he says, recording and re-recording demos trying to recapture what he loved best about the original take. 'You're just chasing perfection in something that is inherently imperfect. You might as well just take the original, that has that life force in it, and run with that,' he says. 'The cool thing about Guitar is that all these songs are the first time they were recorded. They're the demos, essentially. Even just saying that is soothing for me.' Does he plan to release Hear the Music? 'I don't know. I like the idea of having an album just in the vault. Prince-style, you know?' he laughs. 'I think it'll simmer for some time, long enough where I can listen to it again and be like, 'Hmm, that's cool.'' The songs on Guitar are sparse, unbothered. The pace is hazy, guitars warbly, and DeMarco's cracked falsetto leads each track. Thematically, it's heavy. On lead single Home, he's severing ties to his past. On the jagged Nothing At All, he's contending with his sobriety. DeMarco quit alcohol during the pandemic, and nicotine just after. 'It's been an interesting journey,' he says of his sobriety. 'The first couple of years, I was the kind of sober guy where it was like, 'Everything's fine, I can go to the party, do the show, go to the bar. I can do everything the same, and it's not a big deal.' But as you progress, things get amplified and emotions get more intense. Whatever dulling substance abuse does, it takes longer than I thought for it to completely leave your zone. Sometimes you feel fragile, but other times I'm fine.' Sobriety, a farmhouse, wells. It's a wild shift for someone whose dirtbag antics were once as much part of his lore as the music (just Google 'Mac DeMarco drumstick incident'). Social media is filled with threads from distressed fans at shows five or six years ago, worried that DeMarco was sozzled onstage or burning himself with cigarettes mid-song. 'Absolutely, I was a headcase,' he says. Loading Later this year, he'll embark on his first tour since getting sober. Is he concerned about reviving ghosts of the past? 'We'll see,' he says. 'I think that energy was usually present because I felt the music or the show was lacking; it was a way to subsidise like, 'Uh-oh, that song didn't go well.' If we do the songs in a way that's satisfying to me, I'll probably be okay. But who knows? Could crash and burn. Come and see!' he adds with a gap-toothed grin, a salesman in him yet.
The Age
14 hours ago
- The Age
His album was finished. Then he scrapped it and made a new one in 12 days
Mac DeMarco has been digging a well. This is not some poetic metaphor, like Mac's own Chamber of Reflection. Before jumping on our interview, the Canadian indie rocker was out on his new property, a farmhouse on an island off British Columbia that he shares with his partner Kiera McNally, digging a literal well. Or, to be specific, he was building a well? A house for his well? Look, I'm not a carpenter. 'It's a well enclosure. It looks like an outhouse, but it's made of cedar and it's beautiful,' DeMarco, 35, explains, appearing on Zoom like a gap-toothed storm cloud: grey shirt, grey hat, scraggly beard. 'My uncle and cousin came over and were like, 'You know you have to be able to lift it off if they have to pull the deep well out?' So my day has consisted of taking off the siding and finding where the fastener bolts are to the foundation and removing them. It's good because the stress of 'If my well explodes, will we be able to get it out?' was a lot, but I'm also dismantling the nicest looking thing I've ever built so it's been tough.' I don't understand a word he's saying but Mac DeMarco, DIY tradesman, isn't an odd image to conjure. He's been DIYing, in a musical sense, since his 2012 debut, 2, the album that first launched DeMarco's persona as the ' loveable laid-back prince of indie-rock '. His new album, Guitar, was DIYed to a freakish degree – songs, cover art, even videos – and written and recorded in 12 days. 'I'd wake up in the morning and get a song going, or maybe I'd write it the night before,' he says. 'It was quick and easy, and it feels good. When I leave something for too long and try to come back to it, it doesn't feel right, like I'm already onto something else.' Guitar, an album title so bland it feels like a troll, is DeMarco's first proper album since 2019's Here Comes the Cowboy, which debuted in the top 10 on the Billboard 200, an unlikely scenario for such a stridently independent artist. In 2023, years after the album's release, the track Heart to Heart went viral on TikTok and became DeMarco's first song to break into the Billboard Hot 100. After years watching his cult of personality grow, this was tangible evidence of his pop star reach. But DeMarco's not buying it. 'I don't think Here Comes the Cowboy was that big and the top 10 thing, I don't think it was based off some kind of top of the mountain sales,' he says. 'There's ways to pump that stuff up. We had a big tour around then too, so you sell concert tickets and then if you give a vinyl for each concert ticket, it counts as a sale.' It sounds like he doesn't quite trust his own album's success. 'I like that record, but… yeah, maybe I don't trust the success of it,' DeMarco laughs. 'I just think it's funny that the music industry heralds things like that. They're like, you charted. And it's like, so? 'It's like the metrics on Spotify: these artists can have a bajillion listeners, and then nobody comes to the show,' he continues. 'When Heart to Heart charted in the Hot 100, it didn't even get high – it went to 80-something – but everyone was like, 'Oh my god!'. [Distributors] were telling me we should advertise more to keep it going.' He mocks disgust. 'This album came out five years ago and we didn't even do anything to make the song go crazy, so why not just leave it alone, you know?' It's fair to posit that DeMarco – who has run his own indie, Mac's Record Label, since 2018 – has little sympathy for major labels scrambling amid the music industry's new world order. 'TikTok is confusing for a lot of them. But, at the same time, a lot of the big record labels have figured out how to squeeze the lemon. They want to make it seem like they don't know, but they know.' He chuckles at his own cynicism. 'Maybe I'm just a music industry conspiracy theorist. Whatever. It's cute. You chart on this thing, it's cute. I have these gold records now, they're all in my basement. I don't know what to do with them, but it's cool. Amazing.' I've never had an artist work so hard to dissuade me against their own sales triumphs, but such is DeMarco's mission. Numbers? These things don't interest him. So little that he followed his biggest pop success with an album made entirely of instrumental compositions (2023's Five Easy Hot Dogs) and then a monumental 199-track data dump named for Canadian legend Wayne Gretzky (One Wayne G). You ask DeMarco why, he answers why not. 'I know with One Wayne G, some music journalists were like, 'Is this a middle finger? What's he doing?' but it was nothing like that. I just wanted to share music. I wasn't saying 'Listen to the whole thing!'. I don't care if people listen to none of it. It's there if you want it,' says DeMarco. As an oddity – inspired by his Japanese avant-pop idols Ryuichi Sakamoto and Haruomi Hosono, and partly a comment on how we consume music – he's proud of it. 'It's so long that it won't fit on a CD. You could put it out on a 15-record box set, but that's ridiculous. The only medium it'd work on is a Blu-Ray, but I don't even have a way to play a Blu-Ray. I think One Wayne G might be the coolest thing I ever do. The whole thing was just an experiment in, why?' 'I have these gold records now, they're all in my basement. I don't know what to do with them.' Before he recorded Guitar, DeMarco had completed another album titled Hear the Music, which he scrapped. 'I liked the songs, but that was me turning on the faucet or cleaning out the songwriting pipes,' he says. 'I had maybe 14 songs, I demoed them, tried to do master recordings, but I got lost in the sauce. I started trying to change the drum sound every day. I was building isolation tents in the studio. I built a hut out of PVC pipe. I did vocal takes over and over. I went completely nuts.' He's had this problem before, ever since he stopped recording onto tape with 2015's Another One. He'll go into 'an OCD zone', he says, recording and re-recording demos trying to recapture what he loved best about the original take. 'You're just chasing perfection in something that is inherently imperfect. You might as well just take the original, that has that life force in it, and run with that,' he says. 'The cool thing about Guitar is that all these songs are the first time they were recorded. They're the demos, essentially. Even just saying that is soothing for me.' Does he plan to release Hear the Music? 'I don't know. I like the idea of having an album just in the vault. Prince-style, you know?' he laughs. 'I think it'll simmer for some time, long enough where I can listen to it again and be like, 'Hmm, that's cool.'' The songs on Guitar are sparse, unbothered. The pace is hazy, guitars warbly, and DeMarco's cracked falsetto leads each track. Thematically, it's heavy. On lead single Home, he's severing ties to his past. On the jagged Nothing At All, he's contending with his sobriety. DeMarco quit alcohol during the pandemic, and nicotine just after. 'It's been an interesting journey,' he says of his sobriety. 'The first couple of years, I was the kind of sober guy where it was like, 'Everything's fine, I can go to the party, do the show, go to the bar. I can do everything the same, and it's not a big deal.' But as you progress, things get amplified and emotions get more intense. Whatever dulling substance abuse does, it takes longer than I thought for it to completely leave your zone. Sometimes you feel fragile, but other times I'm fine.' Sobriety, a farmhouse, wells. It's a wild shift for someone whose dirtbag antics were once as much part of his lore as the music (just Google 'Mac DeMarco drumstick incident'). Social media is filled with threads from distressed fans at shows five or six years ago, worried that DeMarco was sozzled onstage or burning himself with cigarettes mid-song. 'Absolutely, I was a headcase,' he says. Loading Later this year, he'll embark on his first tour since getting sober. Is he concerned about reviving ghosts of the past? 'We'll see,' he says. 'I think that energy was usually present because I felt the music or the show was lacking; it was a way to subsidise like, 'Uh-oh, that song didn't go well.' If we do the songs in a way that's satisfying to me, I'll probably be okay. But who knows? Could crash and burn. Come and see!' he adds with a gap-toothed grin, a salesman in him yet.
The Age
a day ago
- The Age
Life, death, God: The small film tackling the biggest questions
To say that Kangaroo Island is a personal film is an almighty understatement. Written by Canadian-born Sally Gifford and directed by her Australian husband Timothy David (aka Tim Piper), it is set on the titular island off the coast of South Australia, where they own a holiday house and where David has been going for beach holidays for decades. The plot revolves around an Australian actor called Lou (Rebecca Breeds) who is forced to accept that her shot at the big time in LA may have passed her by, and who reluctantly returns to the family home on the island. And given that Gifford spent years as a struggling actor in LA (she met her husband while waiting tables in a steakhouse 'and I got his order wrong', she admits), is it fair – if a little rude – to surmise that this, too, is personal? 'I'm sure I was drawing on my own experience,' she says. 'But I think I just liked the contrast between Hollywood fictionalised drama versus Kangaroo Island and the real-life drama she was experiencing.' That drama centres on family dynamics. Lou is a party-hard creature who turns up on the island with a massive hangover and no luggage – the spur for a wonderful long-running gag – and is instantly at loggerheads with her Bible-bashing sister Freya (Adelaide Clemens). A gradually unfurling backstory reveals a tortured past involving handsome surfer and university lecturer Ben (Joel Jackson), while the present-day tale focuses on the efforts of father Rory (Erik Thomson) to establish what will happen with his magnificent beachside property once he's gone – which may be sooner than anyone anticipated. It's potentially heavy stuff, but handled with a deftness of touch and perfectly judged comedy that is utterly impressive given this is the debut feature of both Gifford and David, a veteran of the New York advertising world. Gifford makes zero apologies for wanting to tackle the biggest themes imaginable in her debut. 'I'm really interested in art that examines the meaning of life, and in particular the question of 'is there meaning for humans',' she says. 'We are meaning-seeking animals, and yet we may never get the answer to 'what's the point? Why are we all here?' And that's something that's always in my mind. Always.' Kangaroo Island itself feeds that questioning. 'There's so little human development, you really feel like you're one of the animals,' Gifford says. 'When you see a dead kangaroo, or a dead fish on the beach, what does it all mean? It just reinforces those questions for me, what's it all about? And then out of that grew this idea.' For David, time and budget constraints meant he had to approach this film in a very different way to his normal mode. 'A lot of my work in the past has been beauty commercials with people like Kendall Jenner and Zendaya, where you can spend six hours on one shot, you get three days for a 30-second commercial,' he says. By contrast, here he was rattling through four scenes a day. Though it's far from rough and ready – some of the cinematography is gorgeous, and the performances are consistently strong – David says 'happy accidents' were critical to making it all work. 'There's just something real, handmade about the film that I think adds a nice touch.' Still, it was seat-of-the-pants at times. A critical dinner party scene was done in just two takes, for example, despite the fact that in the first, neither of the two cameras captured Erik Thomson, who was a key player. 'Thank God he did the exact same brilliant performance the second time around,' David says. Speaking of God … It's a rare thing for a movie to go there, with neither proselytising nor critical intent. But Kangaroo Island unabashedly does. 'I think it's scary to make a movie about God and feelings and love and end of life, because it is leaning into drama and emotionality,' says Gifford, who says her own position on the topic of God is 'just that constant questioning'. 'We actually are growing tired of films that feel a bit glib and ironic,' she adds, 'and we just wanted to lean into that sentimentality.' 'For me,' says David (who is 'reserving judgement till I die' on the God question), 'it was nice to see a script where there is no bad person. It's just that life can hit you a certain way, and you're forced to react and make decisions that can make you look bad, but it doesn't mean you are bad.
