In Synonyms, a former Israeli soldier forsakes his country and its language and turns up in Paris only to find that knowing French is very different from being French.
Israel/France
3*
Director:
Nadav Lapid
Screenwriters:
Nadav Lapid
Haim Lapid
Director of Photography:
Shai Goldman
Running time: 120 minutes
Original title: Synonymes
The opening shot of Nadav Lapid’s Golden Bear–winning Synonyms is one that will be repeated on many occasions throughout the film in a (surprise, surprise, given the title) way that looks different but has essentially the same meaning. Moving forward and sideways with no clear sense of the horizon, we alternate between pavement and sky. In between, we catch brief glimpses of buildings, immediately recognisable as Parisian. It is our point of view, but then and later again and again, it always floats away to show the person whose view it actually is: the twenty-something Yoav (Tom Mercier), a former Israeli soldier who has “escaped”, in his words, to France and shunned his life in Israel.
Somehow, oddly, we never learn exactly what his motivation for leaving was. The film deals almost entirely in the present without recognising the past, which is exactly what Yoav is intent on doing. On his first day, he arrives at an expansive but bare apartment in the French capital, where he spends the night. The next morning, while taking a shower, his backpack disappears, and he is left without a stitch of clothing. Lucky for him, his curious upstairs (and upscale) neighbours find him passed out in the bathtub and take pity on him by dragging him up to their place, laying him down in their bed and covering his naked body with their goose down. One of them notices that Yoav is circumcised.
That “one” is the boyish Émile (Quentin Dolmaire), a struggling writer with perfect skin and an exquisite wardrobe, who also gets under the covers to warm up the stranger’s body by rubbing against him. It turns out Émile runs a factory (somewhere, making something) and likely inherited it from his family, who also pay the rent. The other is the oboe-playing Caroline (Louise Chevillotte), who is ostensibly his girlfriend, although there is no apparent affection between the two. Affection is reserved for the newcomer, Yoav, who shares many an intimate moment (though never explicitly sexual) with Émile in the first half before Caroline makes a (sexual) move in the second. The setting may be comparable, but the tension of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Dreamers is completely missing.
Yoav is nothing if not absolutely entrancing. In his feature film acting début, Tom Mercier draws us closer to his character primarily by having the face he has and by utterly devoting himself to his character. Yoav’s chosen uniform of Frenchness is an extravagant orange overcoat, given to him by the extremely French, polo neck–wearing Émile, which he wears almost throughout the entire film. Looking like a Jewish version of Jean-Paul Belmondo in his youth, albeit with the eyes of a zombie, Mercier exudes a sex appeal that is derived not from his body (although the many full-frontal shots will thrill a sizable part of the audience) but from the combination of vulnerability and devil-may-care self-confidence.
And yet, very little of substance actually happens. When it does, it comes up against Yoav’s self-imposed obstacle of language. Whatever happened in Israel was so terrible that he has given up speaking Hebrew, although he gladly engages in accented French with Hebrew-speaking Israelis in his newfound home, including at the Israeli Consulate General in Paris, where he works (!). But when an old girlfriend Skypes him or his father turns up in Paris and somehow tracks him down, his refusal to speak his mother tongue cuts off all avenues to us gaining a better understanding of his motivations. A small scene that shows (unwanted) remnants of his past in the present – even a dream with him speaking Hebrew – would have helped enormously to overcome this linguistic absurdity.
The film takes nearly two full acts to arrive at anything resembling a raison d’être. While we know all along that Yoav’s integration into French society is limited to his frequent interactions with Émile and Caroline, it is only in the final stretch that he takes his duty to assimilate semi-seriously. This is where the film finally starts to look more earnestly at the drama associated with changing one’s national identity and the struggles one faces while trying to be accepted into the fold.
But the screenplay and the directing fail in many of the scenes where Yoav speaks French. Despite the accent, he speaks the language fluently and even uses multiple complicated constructions. And he relies on an erudite vocabulary to expatiate on everything from his own experience in the military to Hector’s adventures in the Trojan War. Then, suddenly, everyday words, like “chaussette” (sock) or “tiède” (lukewarm), trip him up. Such moments feel completely unrealistic. Besides, we have no idea where or how Yoav learned to speak French so well in the first place. He even seems to understand it almost perfectly, which is a miraculous feat for a non-native speaker who just moved to a new country. These instances remind us that the film is manufactured, and they alienate us from the experience of living the diegesis that Mercier, in so many other respects, fully embodies.
The wild camerawork out on the street can be nauseating, but director of photography Shai Goldman does an exceptional job of the more intimate moments. In particular, the kissing scene in the tiny apartment where Yoav stays for most of the film is shot in a way that conveys feeling and puts us inside the two actors’ private bubble but leaves us scratching our heads at how he managed to pull off such a show of dexterity.
But dextrous is not a word that can be applied to the screenplay. Besides the structural issues – in particular, the number of scenes that fail to advance the plot – there is also the issue of character development or just presence. Some characters that play a major role in the first half simply fall out of the narrative by the latter part of the film. One memorable example is the roid-brained Yaron, who suspects everyone of being a potential anti-Semite and seeks to smoke them out by loudly humming the Israeli national anthem while invading everyone’s personal space on the metro. His behaviour has us on tenterhooks for a while, but then he disappears in one of the many gaps between scenes.
In a flashback, we see Yoav during his military service shooting a target to smithereens to the beat of Pink Martini’s “Sympathique”. The song’s lyrics continue to resonate in the present, as most of the film consists of Yoav channelling the sentiment that, “Je ne veux pas travailler, je ne veux pas déjeuner, je veux seulement oublier” (“I don’t want to work, I don’t want to have lunch, I just want to forget”). Some viewers may feel the same way.
Synonyms might have been better titled Ellipsis. Or Suspension Point. Or Three Dots…
