Not every filmmaker is a cinephile, but, among those who are, that passion can manifest itself in unexpected ways. The driving pleasure of “Paddington” (2014) and “Paddington 2” (2017)—both adapted from Michael Bond’s celebrated books about a Peruvian-born, London-based, hopelessly marmalade-addicted bear—was the English director Paul King’s particular strain of movie love. King’s films didn’t feel like crass exercises in brand extension; they were classically structured comedies, full of ornate trappings, elegant compositional symmetries, and intricately choreographed bursts of slapstick. Wes Anderson may have been the most recognizable influence, as Wes Anderson often is, but there were deeper affinities, too, with Charlie Chaplin, Busby Berkeley, and Frank Capra.
King has since abdicated the director’s chair, and the newly arrived “Paddington in Peru” marks the feature début of Dougal Wilson, who brings a more stolid, workmanlike touch to the proceedings. But Wilson also introduces a fresh frame of cinematic reference. The story was nearly half over before I realized that I was watching a family movie as reimagined by Werner Herzog. As Paddington returns to his Amazonian homeland with his adopted London clan, the Browns, in tow, we are plunged into a jungle-river adventure mad enough to recall “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” (1972) and “Fitzcarraldo” (1982)—and its study in human-ursine relations is perilous enough to rival “Grizzly Man” (2005).
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Not that the body count in “Paddington in Peru” ever rises above a polite, PG-rated zero. When a tarantula latches onto someone’s face—in an already chaotic scene, set aboard a rickety plane whizzing high above a dense, teeming rain forest—both human and arachnid survive. This will come as a relief to parents who dutifully shielded their children’s eyes when, in the first film, Paddington’s beloved Uncle Pastuzo was crushed (offscreen, but still) by a falling tree. Of course, many of those tots are teen-agers now, and fittingly, in “Paddington in Peru,” the Browns themselves are confronted with the passage of time. Mary Brown (Emily Mortimer, replacing Sally Hawkins) bemoans the growing distance that she and her husband, Henry (Hugh Bonneville), feel from their increasingly independent-minded children, Judy (Madeleine Harris) and Jonathan (Samuel Joslin). But that’s nothing compared with the ten thousand kilometres separating Paddington (voiced by Ben Whishaw) from his beloved Aunt Lucy (Imelda Staunton), who is living out her days at the Home for Retired Bears and, apparently, not faring well without her nephew.
Some overdue family bonding is clearly in order, and so the Browns—along with their spry housekeeper, Mrs. Bird (Julie Walters)—head off to “Darkest Peru,” as Paddington has famously called it, but which, for much of this movie, is awash in sunshine and sugary vibes. Cheeriness persists even when it emerges that Aunt Lucy has gone missing, setting in motion a desperate bear hunt. The shenanigans that ensue—there’s a runaway riverboat, a mysterious talisman, a buried treasure, a top-secret lair, and a climactically monologuing villain—smack more of James Bond than Michael Bond, and the plot, for all its agreeably knowing silliness, often creaks along like a rusty paddle wheel. You sense that age has caught up with not only the characters but the franchise.
When Antonio Banderas turned up as a gold-obsessed boat captain, I thought of the ill-fated diver he played in the last “Indiana Jones” lark and wondered if he had some kind of nautical clause in his contracts: actor for sail. And yet he and the other performers excavate what wit and jollity there is to be had in these strained proceedings, and again and again, with practiced skill, they find it. Bonneville remains as persuasive a worrywart paterfamilias here as he was in “Downton Abbey,” and Whishaw, through vocal inflections alone, makes you believe he is every furry inch the earnest, clumsy, well-mannered, not too easily riled Paddington. But “Paddington in Peru” belongs to Olivia Colman, who, as the Reverend Mother at Aunt Lucy’s retirement home, delivers a performance so rich in winking mischief, and so blissfully untethered to the mechanics of the plot, that she should be billed in the credits as Irreverent Mother. In one giddy moment, Colman sings, strums a guitar, and twirls in a circle in a suspiciously Austrian-looking corner of Peru—a sequence of goofy sublimity that nonetheless leaves behind a whiff of unease, as if neither she nor this movie’s relentlessly high spirits are entirely to be trusted.
A schoolteacher arrives late to class one morning and, angered to find his students in noisy disarray, proceeds to punish them for his irresponsibility. He berates them first as a group, then targets them individually, and in the barrage of barked insults we discern an entire social mood of everyday oppression, an ambiance of humdrum hostility. So begins “Where Is the Friend’s House?” (1987), the first of three films that the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami shot in the village of Koker, and a parable of childhood grace as earthy as it is transcendent. But so, too, begins the dolorous new comedy “Universal Language,” which the Canadian screenwriter and director Matthew Rankin has fashioned as a kind of elaborately deadpan homage to the Iranian New Wave—a Koker-faced satire. The narrative beats are recognizably, even fetishistically, Kiarostami’s, but the formal inflections and jocular rhythms are all Rankin’s. Here, when the teacher (Mani Soleymanlou) storms into school, the camera lingers determinedly outside so that we see only an expanse of snow, a blank wall, and a tantrum erupting in a window the size of a postage stamp. It’s a sharp little visual jab: Rankin knows how to cut a bully down to size.
Once inside the classroom, you may fear an incipient attack of the whimsies. The students include an aspiring comedian—he’s dressed like Groucho Marx—and a nearsighted boy who claims that his eyeglasses were stolen by a turkey. (He isn’t lying; a turkey shop is one of the film’s main locations, and multiple turkeys turn up as either live bit players or dead props.) The teacher scolds his class not just because they are misbehaving but because they “don’t even have the decency to misbehave in French.” “Universal Language,” we soon realize, is not set in Koker, or Tehran, but, rather, Winnipeg—specifically, a Winnipeg where Farsi and French are the official tongues, every sign and logo is in Perso-Arabic script, and even Tim Hortons serves tea in samovars. The aesthetic falls somewhere between wintry Jacques Tati and brutalist Wes Anderson (there he is again): the characters, in bright-colored beanies and earmuffs, pop out against vast, undifferentiated slabs of beige brick and gray concrete. Culturally and architecturally, Rankin’s rendition of the city is an ode to the mundane; major historical events include “The Great Parallel Parking Incident of 1958,” and local businesses include a flower shop, a typewriter store, and something called the Kleenex Repository.
What’s going on here? And where exactly is here? Part of the movie’s considerable, though not inexhaustible, charm is that it doesn’t care to answer. Its cross-cultural world-building—etched, with shabbily retro flair, in boxy frames of grainy 16-mm. film—has a loopy matter-of-factness. At the same time, Rankin’s curio more or less explains itself: as a child of Winnipeg, he has made a funny valentine to the Iranian filmmakers, such as Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and Jafar Panahi, whose work captivated him as a young cinephile. Rankin’s début feature, “The Twentieth Century” (2019), was a surreal, hallucinatory mashup of Canadian history and politics which earned him critical comparisons to another Manitoban cine-fantasist, Guy Maddin. Now, with “Universal Language,” Rankin has mapped out the Canada he knows and the Iran he loves, and layered one atop the other, like superimposed X-rays. What he’s diagnosing, I think, is an acute sense of longing for another time and place—a culture and a country that, thanks to the unifying lingua franca of cinema, felt no more foreign than home.
No wonder the director turns up onscreen partway through, playing a quiet sad-sack version of himself—also named Matthew Rankin—who, perhaps in a similar burst of Paddington-like desire, returns home to Winnipeg for the first time in ages. There, in a comic fantasy of alienation and assimilation, he has a series of friendly run-ins with a few locals who are caught up in their own bizarre journeys: two young schoolgirls, Negin (Rojina Esmaeili) and Nazgol (Saba Vahedyousefi), embark on a quest that plays gentle homage to Panahi’s “The White Balloon” (1995), and a freelance guide, Massoud (Pirouz Nemati), leads visitors on hilariously endless tours of city landmarks—which, in a way, makes him another stand-in for the director. If that idea prompts memories of “Close-Up” (1990), Kiarostami’s destabilizing masterpiece of mistaken identity, then you are probably squarely in Rankin’s target audience. Or maybe not. His film, at its best when it expresses a sincere belief in the possibilities of human connection, can feel trapped in the margins of its conceit, short-circuited by movie love. A shot of bedsheets flapping on a clothesline, a climactic callback to one of Kiarostami’s most bracing images, is not the only moment that seems to traffic in laundered goods. ♦
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