Synonyms (Nadav Lapid, 2019)

A very strange film, Synonyms is obviously being mistaken for a good film in many quarters, so much so that it won the Golden Bear in Berlin over several more deserving entries, including Angela Schanelec's elliptical but tight-as-a-drum I Was At Home, But... and the curiously ignored Ghost Town Anthology by Denis Côté. I should note that I quite liked Lapid's two previous features. I thought Policeman was one of the most perceptive analyses of Israeli masculinity and ethnic paranoia to come along in several years, while The Kindergarten Teacher explored the nature of literary meaning from the perspective of maternal desire and the unlikely proposition of a poetic prodigy. In both cases, Lapid seemed to be asking his viewers to think about how we project our needs onto the Other.

You could think about Synonyms this way as well. Yoav (Tom Mercier) has fled his native Israel to take up residence in Paris. He has sworn off speaking Hebrew, and intends to fully adopt a French identity. To help him in his quest, Lapid allows him to fall in with Émile (Quentin Dolmaire) and Caroline (Louise Chevillotte), a young couple who seem to have fallen out of a Philippe Garrel film. He's a frustrated writer with a trust fund; she's an oboe player with an orchestra who, truth be told, has no discernible personality apart from being young, beautiful, and French.

So in a way, Yoav is embracing his own projected idea of "France" onto everything he sees, trying to play the swoony, loose-limbed romantic. I guess. But there is a desultory quality to Synonyms that makes the film both suggestive (for its admirers) and maddening (for people like me). It sets up highly symbolic scenarios in a halting, hesitant way, like a sketchbook of allegorical impulses that you, the viewer could pursue if you so desire, although I'm not so sure any of them would pan out in any systematic way.

For instance, Synonyms is obsessed with Yoav's body, especially his dick. ("Circumcised," Émile remarks, apropos of nothing, as he and Caroline drag his naked, nearly lifeless body into their flat.) During the brief sex scenes between Yoav and Caroline, Lapid makes sure to keep Caroline partially clothed but to always display Yoav's ass and substantial cock. And eventually, Yoav ends up doing some gay porn, which seems dubiously plausible, given that he has less humiliating ways to make ends meet. 

Is Lapid suggesting that the Israeli / Jewish body is both the fetish and the object of repulsion for secular France? Comparing Synonyms' focus on Yoav's body with his own denial of his Israeli identity, and the French teacher's flat-out rejection of religion in the name of the Republic, one could follow this line of thinking. But then again, as Synonyms goes along, and Yoav's behavior becomes more and more erratic, we might just as easily ask whether he himself is an allegorical figure for some force that France seemingly welcomes but cannot really accommodate. Is Israel itself bipolar? After all, Yaron (Uria Hayek), based on his actions on the Metro, appears just as unhinged as Yoav. One could follow this line of thinking as well, that Synonyms is about Israel as a Westernized nation, conceived as an idea, that has become something intolerable and unacceptable, both in and out of the fold.

Or it could all just be about masculinity. It seems clear, with all the flashbacks to Yoav's military service, that something went wrong in his inculcation into "proper" Israeli manhood. He tries and fails to set this right with his job at the embassy. (Which, if Yoav is in France to leave his Israeli identity behind, why would he seek employment at the Israeli embassy?) And late in the game, Lapid introduces some classic father / son issues, suggesting that Yoav, either mentally ill or simply saddled with an "artistic temperament," cannot quite fit the mold of the Israeli hard man. There are, of course, intimations of homosexuality throughout Synonyms, even up to the point where bedding Caroline could almost be seen as sleeping with Émile by proxy, a kind of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick homosocial maneuver.

But who knows? Lapid throws all of this at the wall, and from minute to minute, none of it carries through or seems more urgent than any other part. Like the several shaky-cam moments where we occupy Yoav's ambling point of view, it's as if Synonyms wants us to observe artistic indecisiveness and truncated thinking as if it were a passkey to Yoav's psyche. But instead, the film a collection of halfhearted gestures, gussied up with broad acting and stylistic aggression.

Put another way, Synonyms is a bit like if the Domino's driver handed you two tomatoes, three mushrooms, a stick of pepperoni, a bell pepper, and a lump of dough, and told you to enjoy your meal.