MATTERS OF LIFE AND DEATH
NADAV LAPID LOOKS WITHIN TO PORTRAY
THE ESSENCE OF THE OUTLIER
BY JORDAN CRONK
S
eemingly incapable of filming a visually uninteresting
scene, Nadav Lapid continues to refine his highly muscular
compositional sense, which can turn even the most mundane
encounter into a moment fraught with energy and tension. I
spoke with Lapid two days before Synonymswon the Golden
Bear at the 69th Berlinale in February.
Can you tell me a bit about the personal experiences that
inspired Synonyms?
The film is based on personal experience in the sense that more or
less all the things that occur in it have really happened. Some-
times in different versions, sometimes closer to my experience.
For example, like everyone in Israel, I served three or three and a
half years in the military. When I completed my service, on one of
my first days out, I colored my hair platinum as a way of telling
myself it was over. And that same day I had a job interview at a
fashionable magazine in Tel Aviv. In the evenings I’d grab a beer
with a friend, and it was strange because it was as if nothing had
ever happened. It had been super intense for three years in the
military, moving to live somewhere else, on the border, in the
belly of a mountain, in a life that has nothing to do with the one
you’ve previously led. And then it’s over and you go back to your
normal life and you have to reinvent yourself, because when you
started you were in high school and you were a different person.
So I did: I studied philosophy at university, and I began writing
novels, and I started working for a newspaper, sometimes writing
reviews––but not film reviews. At that time I knew nothing about
cinema. I didn’t know that films had directors. Like most people
in Israel, I’d seen some American movies, but I thought that cin-
ema was a thing for people who don’t have a capacity for abstrac-
tion. I felt more connected to literature.
But at some point, about a year and a half later, I had an
epiphany, this feeling that I must run away and never come back.
It was like a vision, like that tale of Plato’s cave, where if some-
one gets out and sees the light, they’re unable to go back, because
when they go back, they are killed. I knew I needed to leave
Israel, but I hesitated about where I should go. And it was a big
decision, because it’s as if this new place was where I was going
to live or die. I chose Paris, well, mainly because of my childish
admiration for Napoleon Bonaparte. I landed at Charles de
Gaulle [Airport] with no practical plans for the future, but with
a clear idea that I was going to leave everything behind and
become French. So I stopped talking in Hebrew, and that was
strange. For a month or two, I talked with my parents in English,
but then I stopped talking in anything but French.Did you consider that a political decision? Does Yoav?
It depends how you define political. I don’t think that it’s politi-
cal in the narrow sense of Yoav simply opposing Israeli politics. I
think Yoav has a problem with what he feels is the Israeli collec-
tive soul, the DNA of the place, the melody, the existential music
of the state. He ran away from Israel as someone running away
from a demon, as if he saw the worst demon. And in that sense
there’s a logic in refusing to speak in Hebrew, because the words
contain the same sickness. Israel drove me crazy and I asked
myself, “What does it help if you run away but keep on speakingYoav’s battle against conformity represents a recurrent theme
in Lapid’s cinema, marking Synonyms as the final installment of
an unofficial trilogy alongside Policeman and The Kindergarten
Teacher. Apart from their semiautobiographical origins, all three
films share a narrative of uprising, whether armed or symbolic.
In Policeman, a young anarchist group takes a billionaire busi-
nessman hostage at a wedding reception to denounce the class
inequality perpetrated by those in power. A less directly political
but equally radical figure, The Kindergarten Teacher’s protagonist
kidnaps her 5-year-old wunderkind student to rescue him from
the materialistic contemporary world that threatens to inhibit his
poetic sensibility. Transforming language into a weapon of resis-
tance, the dissidents of Policeman and The Kindergarten Teacher
find a brazen successor in Synonyms’s Yoav. The grandson of a
Palestinian Jewish terrorist and a Lithuanian political refugee, Yoav
is a born rebel following in the footsteps of his ancestors. (His
rejection of Hebrew turns out to be a tribute to his paternal
grandfather’s refusal to speak his native Yiddish after migrating to
Mandatory Palestine.) Depicted more elliptically than in Lapid’s
previous films, Yoav’s revolt is aimed as much at Israel as at
France. Determined to spend his life in Paris, Yoav enters into a
sham marriage with Caroline, but finds his idealized views shat-
tered by the citizenship course he is required to attend. There, he
encounters French nationalism as personified by a condescending
teacher (Léa Drucker), who extols her country’s virtues and treats
students as proxies for their homelands. Yoav’s response to his
teacher’s alienating methods is theatrical rather than rhetorical.
When asked to sing “La Marseillaise,” he engages in a performance
by confidently walking around the room and urging his class-
mates, all immigrants like himself, to rise to their feet and sing
along to the anthem’s militant chorus—a metaphorical call to
action that blurs the frontiers between transgression and madness.
The film’s descent into radicalization is inscribed in the lineage
of Paul Schrader’s existential stories of extremism, from his
screenplay for Taxi Driver to his late-career masterpiece, 2017’s
First Reformed. Like Schrader’s portrayals of pathological loneli-
ness, Synonyms devotes considerable screen time to Yoav’s solitary
existence in his room, immersing us in his cooking and exercising
rituals. In vignettes that evince a nightmarish aura, we watch him
eat the same cheap dish—spaghetti with ready-made tomato sauce42 | FILMCOMMENT|July-August 2019
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