‘Synonyms’ Review: Brilliant. Relentless. Comic. Tragic.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/movies/synonyms-review.html

Version 0 of 1.

When the young Israeli in “Synonyms” rushes through Paris, he keeps his head down. Intense and wary, he views beauty as a bribe that the city pays strangers to keep them from its heart. So he walks and talks, trying to find it, head bowed while he practices his French. It’s a habit that feels like a mania and looks like a defense. As he circles the city he’s building a wall, each French word a rebuke to the Hebrew he refuses to speak.

Furious, brilliant, exhausting, “Synonyms” is the story of a man in self-imposed exile. Physically coiled and linguistically expansive, Yoav (Tom Mercier, charismatic and expressively stoic), has arrived in Paris with little more than his clothes. He has come to the city “to flee Israel” — each step, scene and recited noun shows how far he has to go — but soon loses his clothing along with his other few possessions, leaving him as naked as a newborn and ready for rebirth. The director Nadav Lapid isn’t afraid of obvious situations, bold gestures and didactic metaphors, all of which he deploys in a coming-into-consciousness tale of violence and memory, being and belonging.

“Synonyms” is the latest full-length feature from Lapid, whose exploration of Israeli identity in his movies is politically diagnostic rather than didactic. In his electric feature debut, “Policeman,” he presents an unsparing vision of Israel by setting an Israeli counterterrorism unit against Jewish class warriors turned terrorists. His last movie, “The Kindergarten Teacher,” also takes place in Israel and focuses on a woman who becomes obsessed with a virtuosic boy poet, a squirmy fixation that opens up into a critique of Israeli militarism and machismo in a battle between barbarism and culture. (The American remake shares the original’s title but lacks its political edge.)

Identity also drives “Synonyms,” which opens with Yoav racing along gray Paris streets, the hand-held camera violently lurching behind him, struggling to keep up. He rapidly and somewhat mysteriously enters a grand, sprawling but vacant apartment, a resonant harbinger of his emerging relationship with France. The flat’s anonymous benefactor remains as enigmatic as the thief who soon robs Yoav of his clothing and scant belongings. But like a fairy-tale princess, he is just as quickly rescued by Émile (Quentin Dolmaire) and Caroline (Louise Chevillotte), indolent beauties with sensuous mouths and impassive gazes that, lizardlike, flicker to life on seeing Yoav.

They find him unconscious in a large bathtub, his head tilted back. In contrast to Yoav’s frenetic introduction, this image is ordered and precisely framed, and it announces a visual contrast that Lapid maintains as he toggles between distancing tableaus and jaggedly expressionistic movement. The bathtub scene mirrors Jacques-Louis David’s idealized painting of the murdered revolutionary martyr Marat, an association that immediately aligns Yoav with death. From Émile and Caroline’s erotically charged looks at his hard, lovely, sculpted body, Yoav also presents a morbidly romantic vision that’s reinforced when they pile him into a fur-covered bed.

Thereafter, the story tracks Yoav during his comically bleak and desperate attempt at metamorphosis as he moves between his French friends and a coterie of thuggish Israeli men as well as the opposing worlds they embody. Yoav’s transition doesn’t go smoothly, although Émile helps with cash and a wardrobe that includes a coat in goldenrod yellow that Yoav rarely takes off. It’s an ornament of his desires, much like the French that he obsessively practices, voicing words that rush together in a vehement stream or bubble up one at a time: “Odious. Repugnant. Fetid. Obscene,” he says as he restlessly paces, carefully and unmusically enunciating each word.

Yoav is trying to substitute French for Hebrew, France for Israel, the present for the past, but he’s incapable of trading the soldier’s march for the flâneur’s stroll. He’s estranged from his country and his family as well as the histories — heroic, tragic, mythic — that surface in his stories and in flashbacks of him during his military service. These strange, surrealistic moments, Lapid suggests, represent everyday Israel, or at least the country that Yoav endured, survived, fled. But his desire to transform himself is, of course, futile. He has already been shaped by other words and another world, whose tensions and contradictions are his existential burden.

That burden is an agony, and while Lapid handles it lightly at first, coaxing your laughs, the movie weighs heavier and heavier as amusement turns to despair. Lapid makes you feel that transition deeply, partly by creating empathy and by building alienation into both the story and his telling. Nothing if not relentless, he puts Yoav through an isolating, antagonizing crucible, including in a scene of degradation that deliberately stretches on too long, too uncomfortably. He turns Yoav’s naked, Jewish body into an abject display, forcing you to look and daring you to look away, a crystallizing moment in a movie that turns rage into pain and identity into a howl.

Synonyms

Not rated. In French and Hebrew, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes.