Film Comment – July 01, 2019

I

n the opening sequence of nadav lapid’s third feature,

Synonyms, a young traveler faints from cold inside the bath-

tub of a bare apartment in Saint-Germain-des-Prés after

having his belongings stolen. Suspended in a pose recalling

Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat, his naked body

is discovered the next morning by a bourgeois bohemian

couple residing in the building, Emile (Quentin Dolmaire) and

Caroline (Louise Chevillotte), who carry him onto their bed and

revive his pulse by rubbing him vigorously. “Is this death?” Yoav

(Tom Mercier) asks in accented French when he wakes up in

Paris a day after leaving Tel Aviv with no plans to return. Drap-

ing him in a yellow wool coat and furnishing him with money

and supplies, Emile, the son of a rich industrialist and an aspir-

ing writer, launches the ex-soldier into his new identity as a

Frenchman in the city of his dreams.

Based on the 44-year-old Lapid’s own memories of living in

Paris following his military service, Synonymsis an alternately satir-

ical and sobering meditation on the impossibility of escaping one’s

roots. Desperate to break away from his country, Yoav vows never

to speak Hebrew again and devotes himself to mastering French by

memorizing synonyms from a portable dictionary and recounting

his life to Caroline and Emile, with whom he forms a love triangle.

Yet Israel provides the setting for all his stories, and its legacy is

seared into the very flesh of his sculpted warrior’s body. As quin-

tessentially French as his words may sound, Yoav’s body—a site

of trauma, violence, and sexual objectification—betrays his oth-

erness as an Israeli man shaped by his army experience.

A leading figure of contemporary Israeli cinema, Lapid is known

for his sensitive and idiosyncratic explorations of that nation’s col-

lective psyche. From the insurrectionary tale of his debut Policeman

(2011) to his 2014 follow-up The Kindergarten Teacher’s semiautobi-

ographical portrait of a child poet, his work pays tribute to the lib-

erating power of language and art in the face of militarism and

materialism. With Synonyms—which won the Golden Bear at this

year’s Berlinale—Lapid brings his subversive vision to France, the

country that once gave him shelter from Israel’s troubles and

prompted his love of cinema. But rather than purvey a nostalgic

evocation of youth, the director’s latest offers a critical outlook on

the circumstances leading to his avatar’s disillusionment with his

surrogate home—an intellectual’s haven as much as a variation on

the nationalistic nightmare from which he fled.

“No country can be all of those things at the same time,”

Emile replies to Yoav’s breathless litany of pejoratives describing

Israel. At once whimsical and sophisticated, Yoav’s performative

monologues invoke a spoken-word tradition ranging from

ancient troubadours to modern-day slam poets. Drawing on the

40 | FILMCOMMENT| July-August 2019

Closer Look:Synonymswill be released this fall by Kino Lorber.

STRANGER IN A

Nadav Lapid’s fiercely compelling Synonymskeeps the pace with an Israeli in