Synonyms
Written by Haim and Nadav Lapid
Directed by Nadav Lapid
Starring Tom Mercier, Quentin Dolmaire and Louise Chevillotte
Running time: 2 hours and 3 minutes
by Ryan Smillie
When I started learning French in earnest in middle school, a textbook warned to watch out for faux amis (false friends), words that look like English words but have different meanings. Un raisin is a grape, not a raisin. Attendre doesn’t mean “to attend,” rather “to wait.” And our class was told many times not to use excité to say we were excited (it wasn’t until later that we learned it most often means “aroused”).
In a sense, Nadav Lapid’s Synonyms is filled with faux amis. Inspired by Lapid’s own flight from Israel to France, the film follows Yoav (Tom Mercier, in an electrifying debut performance) as he arrives in Paris, abandons his native Hebrew, and attempts to immerse himself in a new French life. Though he is robbed and left naked in an empty apartment on his first night, he is discovered (and clothed) by a young, rich couple in the building. With the aid of a French dictionary (and Emile and Caroline (Quentin Dolmaire and Louise Chevillotte)), Yoav savors the language, frequently repeating words with related meanings or sounds. However, his expanded vocabulary only serves to obscure the way he communicates. When he describes Israel to Emile with a litany of negative synonyms, Emile insists that no one place could be all of those things and that Yoav has to pick one. Yoav’s words all have meanings, but what does he mean
Meanwhile, Synonyms buzzes with kinetic energy, both in the camerawork and in Mercier’s performance. Shaï Goldman’s otherwise elegant and playful cinematography is occasionally interrupted by freewheeling, handheld point-of-view shots following Yoav around Paris. These grainy shots are propulsive and claustrophobic, tight and constantly in motion, putting us in Yoav’s head (often paired with a voiceover of his increasingly manic thoughts). When not focused on his mind, however, the camera trains itself on Yoav’s body. The first night’s robbery leaves Yoav naked and sprinting across the empty apartment in an intensely physical sequence. And when Emile and Caroline discover him the next morning, getting his body out of the cold tub and into a warm bed is the focal point. Even in a dance scene at a party later in the film, it is impossible to take your eyes off Mercier as he dances to “Pump Up the Jam” with a loaf of bread.
Much like his words, Yoav’s body seems to complicate his thoughts rather than clarify them. As he gets closer to Emile and Caroline, the three of them develop a strange sexual chemistry. One shares scene after scene of nearly unbearable sexual tension with Yoav – heads pressed together, bodies in close proximity, eye contact unwavering – that is never released. The other merely has an affair with him (in some of Synonyms’ most clinically shot scenes). This disconnect culminates outside of this bizarre love triangle with a pornographic photoshoot, with Yoav as the subject. As the setups get more and more explicit, Yoav goes along with them nearly emotionlessly, that is, until the photographer insists on Yoav speaking Hebrew as he masturbates. After some resistance, Yoav concedes and erupts into a stream of angry Hebrew, questioning why he’s even there (in the studio? in Paris?), none of which the photographer (still snapping away) can understand.
In stark contrast to the ever-present tension in Yoav’s disjointed words and body stands the crowd of Israeli Parisians he encounters, particularly Yaron (Uria Hayik), his coworker at the Israeli embassy. These men reject French in favor of Hebrew and adopt a combative, macho posture – one that hearkens back to memories of the Israeli army that Yoav continues to return to. In one memorably uneasy scene, Yaron puts on a yarmulke and aggressively hums the Israeli national anthem at his fellow subway passengers. For Yaron, his Israeli identity is something to broadcast, not to be fractured and hidden. Yoav’s decision to all but renounce his identity is at once questioned and illuminated – he blends in with the rest of the uncomfortable passengers, but once they reach their stop, he is still getting off the train with Yaron. For all his attempts towards a French identity, he’s still bound to the Israeli one he is trying to leave behind.
Like a faux ami, Synonyms presents a set of situations that seems familiar at first, but turns out to be anything but what you were expecting. Yoav’s careening through Paris only intensifies from the film’s first point-of-view shot, and any idea of where the film is going is quickly thwarted. A genuinely surprising and effective film, this is not one to be missed.