STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND
IN THE OPENING SEQUENCE OF NADAV LAPID’S THIRD FEATURE, Synonyms, a young traveler faints from cold inside the bathtub of a bare apartment in Saint-Germain-des-Prés after having his belongings stolen. Suspended in a pose recalling Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat, his naked body is discovered the next morning by a bourgeois bohemian couple residing in the building, Emile (Quentin Dolmaire) and Caroline (Louise Chevillotte), who carry him onto their bed and revive his pulse by rubbing him vigorously. “Is this death?” Yoav (Tom Mercier) asks in accented French when he wakes up in Paris a day after leaving Tel Aviv with no plans to return. Draping him in a yellow wool coat and furnishing him with money and supplies, Emile, the son of a rich industrialist and an aspiring writer, launches the ex-soldier into his new identity as a Frenchman in the city of his dreams.
Based on the 44-year-old Lapid’s own memories of living in Paris following his is an alternately satirical and sobering meditation on the impossibility of escaping one’s roots. Desperate to break away from his country, Yoav vows never to speak Hebrew again and devotes himself to mastering French by memorizing synonyms from a portable dictionary and recounting his life to Caroline and Emile, with whom he forms a love triangle. Yet Israel provides the setting for all his stories, and its legacy is seared into the very flesh of his sculpted warrior’s body. As quintessentially French as his words may sound, Yoav’s body—a site of trauma, violence, and sexual objectification—betrays his otherness as an Israeli man shaped by his army experience.
