In his third feature, “Synonyms,” Israeli writer-director Nadav Lapid proves he has a fascination with people who take things too far, whether extremists, romantics, or some inextricable mesh of the two. His first film, “Policeman” follows anti-terrorist agents and the young radicals they clash with. His second, “The Kindergarten Teacher”—remade in English with Maggie Gyllenhaal in the titular role—traces the life of a poetry-obsessed elementary school teacher who finds deranged hope in an unlikely prodigy. His newest subject fits snug into the world of realist, socio-politically infused Lapid zealots: Yoav (Tom Mercier), an ex-military beefcake of a young man who’s recently decamped to Paris in the throes of an identity crisis.
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We meet the Israeli man as he arrives in France, Lapid hurling us into the center of the mental and emotional mess from the get-go. It’s only a matter of minutes before Yoav is stark naked and wet, sprinting and slipping around the empty mansion of an apartment he’s found himself in, trying to figure out what happened to his belongings (which included his only source of warmth) after they disappeared during his 45-second shower. Where most would likely declare an emergency and take to the public arena for help and survival, Yoav slinks back into the tub, seemingly resigned to an imminent death in the icy, empty cold of his urban cave.
As a result, we’re introduced to Caroline (Louis Chevillotte) and Emile (Quentin Dolmaire), the gifted, youthful, opulent, and surfeited couple living below him. Yoav wakes up lying on a bed that might as well be a cloud, wrapped in a luscious goose-feather blanket, his two saviors staring at him blankly. They feed and clothe him while he speaks in spurts, steering away from the basic who-how-when-where of your typical introductory conversation, and instead contextualizing himself through metaphorical memory.
He tells them about confusing a gun for a violin, a familial freezing tradition on a mountain, and his time as a child spent laughing at the tale of Hector of Troy running from Achilles, all of us—Christine and Emile included—unsure as to whether his stories are intentionally cryptic or just odd. He eventually reveals that he’s an ex-soldier who absconded to Paris to escape the “obscenity,” “nastiness,” and “evil” of his home country Israel, to break free from his identity and nationality, to dance defiantly in discotheques, to restart.
It doesn’t help that his French is rocky, and he vehemently refuses to speak Hebrew, his native tongue. He’s constantly double-checking with his new friends to make sure he’s employing the right terms and nailing down the grammar. His regular misuse and misunderstanding of French is a central theme of the film (consider the title: “Synonyms”), the idea that one can sever themselves from their nationality and choose a new one picked apart by Lapid as intricately as the concept of how one’s nationality actually defines them. What constitutes one’s identity?
Yoav struts about town practicing the new language he claims, reciting synonyms and homonyms to himself furiously, the unfolding disdain for his Israeli home bubbling up with every new vocabulary word. Mercier is invigorating and magnetizing as the unhinged immigrant. He’s energetic, excitable, and eager, like a temperamental, sugar-wired child with a severe case of ADD fused with a delusional, naïve victim of PTSD hellbent on French naturalization through self-immolation.
In his unique and dated comprehension of French language and culture, he pieces together his own parlance, visions of European dukes and duchesses, counts and countesses dancing through his head as he glows at himself in the mirror wearing the regal pale saffron coat given to him by Emile. The time he spends with Emile and Caroline is more tonal and thematic than it is plot-heavy, like the movie as a whole. His individual relationships with both are romantically inspired, the connection to Caroline leaning on masculinity and musical influence (he regularly listens to her play the oboe) and the fondness for Emile born from exploratory homoeroticism and poetic literary theorizing.
Conversations with Emile and Caroline serve as portals into Yoav’s auto-asphyxiated masculinity, the tension he feels between the unparalleled but conflicting brands of strength of Napoleon and Kurt Cobain, his yearning to leave militant violence in his past—despite how much he excelled at, as flashbacks inform us—and his fear of the ancestors and traditions that linger and haunt him like ghosts. If the language, culture, history, and blood that substantiate those ghosts comprise four of the nine essential amino acids of our soul’s DNA, then trading for a new nationality will only ever land Yoav back in the same place. His phantom French nationality will eventually drudge up an overfamiliarity that will breed cynicism and disgust similar to that which drove him to it in the first place.
Those of us watching with English subtitles are bound to miss some of Lapid’s nuance, Yoav’s slight mispronunciation of words, confusion with other similar-sounding words, and utilization of overly literal or archaic words (as French-speakers have pointed out) bound to zip over our heads. It’s one of the few aspects of Lapid’s stunning work that doesn’t always translate for non-Francophones. But at the same time, it reinforces the core directive of the film: our conception of language and nationality, and the identity it inculcates in us is strictly experiential. One’s identity is not predicated on a limited, popular understanding of one’s country.
Director of Photography Shai Goldman matches the sincerity, absurdity, and tone of Nadav and Haim Lapid’s (his father) screenplay with distinct, sporadic camerawork, and in doing so, relays Yoav’s (at times literal) wrestling with who he is. Goldman’s chaotic cinematography is like a firework, its raw, explosive energy always teetering on the brink of detonation, hypnotizing you in its unpredictability, and reminding you to keep a safe distance every time it goes off in a fit of shaky, first-person footage or a whirlwind of careening whip-pans. And Era Lapid’s (Nadav’s mother) editing structures Goldman’s work marvelously, often jerking us around yet aware of when the restraint of smooth cinematic refrains comes in handy.
Oddly enough, “Synonyms” is a perfect companion piece to “Midnight in Paris,” another film in which a man cynical towards his home seeks refuge in the City of Lights in hopes of an inner rebirth, only to learn something crucial: one’s identity is a totally singular blend of the languages they speak—linguistic, emotional, cultural, existential, professional, and otherwise—that cannot be reductively defined by when and where they were born. Yoav’s journey demonstrates the frailty and insignificance of borders, the emptiness of stereotypes, and the malleable characteristics of nationalities. But, in Yoav’s final, furious act, it also reveals that our true self will eventually emerge, regardless of what faux kin we claim or what pride we suffocate. We can ignore and neglect our past, but we can’t rid ourselves of it. A new tongue or an impressive fresh coat can add to someone, but it can’t erase someone’s past. With that task, it’s merely camouflage for the essential self that beats feverishly at the door to be embraced. [A-]
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