musicality of the French language, Yoav vividly conjures up
images from his past, whether an army anecdote about blasting
his machine gun to the jazzy beat of Pink Martini’s “Sympa-
thique” or his childhood fascination with the Trojan War’s mythi-
cal heroes. An idealistic drifter with larger-than-life aspirations,
he identifies with Napoleon Bonaparte, a famous orator himself,
and fantasizes about being buried at the historic Père Lachaise
Cemetery alongside France’s most prominent thinkers and artists.
The gap between Yoav’s dream world and his daily struggles
with poverty and marginalization as an unemployed foreigner
finds an unsettling embodiment in his walks around the capital
that punctuate the narrative. In these visceral updates on the
French New Wave’s iconic scenes of flânerie, the subjective hand-
held camera pans back and forth between the ground and the sky
as the character represses the impulse to gaze at the city’s land-
marks by frantically enumerating synonyms in voiceover. Con-
trasting with stereotypical romantic depictions of Paris, the film’s
urban interludes unfold in a detached mental space where lan-
guage becomes an abstract and rhythmic expression of the protag-
onist’s breakdown, as when a hungry Yoav raps about food using
onomatopoeia and interjections. Reminiscent of 20th-century
avant-garde experiments with sound poetry, Yoav’s irrational
stream-of-consciousness flow conveys Paris’s chaos on a sensory
level. The fragmentary speech also combines with the camerawork’sraw immediacy to re-create the phenomenological experience of
warfare, the traumatic shadow lurking behind Yoav’s efforts to fit in.P
erpetually out of place, yoav leads a double life
split between his French and Israeli selves. Despite
rejecting his homeland, he gets a security guard job
at the Israeli Embassy, bonds with Yaron (Uria
Hayik), a patriotic colleague who addresses him in
their native tongue, and continues to be attracted to
primitive rituals of manhood: he revels in watching an improvised
fight between Yaron and Michel (Olivier Loustau), the belligerent
leader of the Zionist Betar movement’s Paris branch who recruits
Yaron for slaying local neo-Nazis. The tension between Yoav’s mind
and body culminates when he takes a gig posing for a pornographic
shoot after being fired from the embassy for misconduct. An
increasingly humiliating experience, the session begins with a naked
Yoav being asked to talk dirty into the camera. He stutters ner-
vously and forgets his lines, causing the director (Christophe Paou)
to snap and order him to switch to Hebrew. Yoav fights to keep his
oath of silence, but his employer insists. What follows is a trance-
like outburst of vulnerability and rage wherein Yoav repeatedly
curses in Hebrew while masturbating on the floor. Divorced from
their meaning, his words build up to a rebellious roar against the
dehumanizing consumerist society he navigates.July-August 2019| FILMCOMMENT| 41STRANGE LAND
Paris caught somewhere between misfit struggle and revolutionary profundity
| BY YONCA TALU