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!”

Showing at the 62nd New York Film Festival following its celebrated appearance at this year’s Cannes and Toronto fests, Universal Language is the drollest and oddest film of the year—and one of the funniest as well. Writer/director Matthew Rankin’s latest defies easy categorization and is all the better for it, segueing between absurdist registers with a deftness that allows it to both amuse and move. A fragmented tale about disparate individuals in search of themselves, community, and home—and, in its self-consciousness, about cinema’s ability to bring people together—it’s an off-kilter creation that feels........

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