Movie Review: Synonyms - Nadav Lapid's film looks at the fluidity and limitations of meaning (and identity)
, strip for a shower, and step out of the tub to find that he’s been robbed blind and naked, with only a workmanlike grasp on French to help him get by. It’s cold.
As he lies freezing in the bathroom, he’s rescued by two good-enough Samaritans living in the same building, Emilie and Caroline . They carry Yoav to their flat, wrap him up in fur blankets, and bring him back from the brink. “I have nothing anymore,” he tells them, staring up at the ceiling as if watching Heaven’s gates slowly receding from view. Materially, he’s right. In terms of identity, he’s wrong, and Lapid devotes the following 110 minutes of his film to proving as much.
There’s a risk to Lapid’s approach: Yoav’s clumsy autodidactism makes logical sense, because who doesn’t carry around language guides with them in foreign places where they don’t speak the local lingo, but it also makes the film’s all-encompassing metaphor obvious verging on overdetermined.
Selfhood is Lapid’s chief concern. It’s Yoav’s impetus for abandoning his country for another. He has valid justifications for his exodus; Israel, as he describes it, is an odious nation, one synonym among many in his arsenal for excoriating his birthplace. . But Yoav recklessly believes he can cash in his old nationality for a shiny new one to solve his worldly woes, change who he is, where he comes from, and better himself in so doing.
It’s enough to make a man mad, and so it goes for Yoav. Lapid articulates Yoav’s increasingly fevered quest for the impossible through aesthetic fluidity: Whip pans and judicious use of saturated colors, couched foremost in the mustard-yellow, knee-length coat Emilie plucks from his wardrobe for Yoav at the beginning of the movie. It all reflects the movie’s rich and assertive style, a detached cool to hold the audience at the proper distance from Lapid’s narrative.
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