Review: Synonyms

Image courtesy of Kino Lorber.

Nadav Lapid's "Synonyms" is an engaging, occasionally maddening and often quite funny satire about the difficulties of shedding one's skin - and there's a fair amount of skin in this uninhibited film - when fleeing one's homeland and starting over elsewhere.

As the film opens, Yoav (Tom Mercier) is an Israeli soldier who has left behind his family to start anew in Paris. When we meet him, he is breaking into a fancy - but empty - apartment that he clearly can't afford, stripping down and taking a shower. Upon arriving back in the apartment's empty living room, he finds his clothes and belongings have been swiped. If Yoav wanted to erase who he was, he's literally at this point lost everything he has.

A young French couple - Caroline (Louise Chevillotte) and Emile (Quentin Dolmaire) - discover Yoav naked and passed out in the apartment's bathtub. They take him to their place and - for much of the rest of the film's running time - take care of him in one form or fashion. Emile can afford to: he's a wannabe writer whose rich businessman father allows him and Caroline to live rent-free in the luxurious apartment. Caroline plays in an orchestra. They ply Yoav with money, clothes and job opportunities.

During the course of the picture, Yoav strives to learn the French language, refusing to speak Hebrew, and he carries around a pocket dictionary from which he frequently repeats various synonyms - hence the film's title - for words he learns as he walks down the Parisian streets. He meets another Israeli man, an angry fellow named Yaron (Uria Hayik) who likes to aggressively tell people he's Jewish in the hope of getting into a fight, and briefly works security at an embassy. Despite fleeing Israel, Yoav is still stuck spending much of his time with Israeli expats.

Yoav lives in a crappy apartment, where he serves himself pasta and sauce from the can every night. To make ends meet, he puts out feelers to become a male model, and is soon hired by a man who photographs him in various stages of undress, all the while forcing him to speak pornographic dialogue - although Yoav draws a line when asked to speak it in Hebrew.

"Synonyms" is an often funny movie about dislocation and isolation. The bath in the opening sequence is symbolic of Yoav's rebirth, although even more important is the fact that in both the opening and closing scenes, he is seen pounding on doors that are never opened to him. No matter how hard he tries - and goes through a citizenship class that involves absurd exercises - he'll always be an outsider pleading to be let in.

The film is stylish, frank, given to bursts of absurd comedy and aggressive, much like Yoav, who in the film's final sequences becomes a brute almost to an off-putting extent. "Synonyms" occasionally revels in the obvious - it's clear that in his relationship with Emile and Caroline that he'll eventually sleep with one of them, while the other merely pines for him - and its final third could have been chopped a little and still gotten the point across. But it's overall an engrossing movie with an impressive central performance and a lot of energy to spare.