Naked in Paris
Like an alien dropping out of the sky, Yoav, the hero of Nadav Lapid’s Synonyms, is introduced as a being without a home, a purpose, or even clothes. As he scrambles naked around a vacant Parisian apartment, his strong, lean, athletic body mitigates his desperate situation: it’s the body of someone who could possibly survive anything. It’s also the body of the incredible new actor Tom Mercier, who has never acted before in cinema. As if out of a fairy tale, Yoav luckily has a couple, would-be writer Emile (Quentin Dolmaire) and orchestra oboist Caroline (Louise Chevillotte), take him in. Charming yet harsh, friendly yet unhinged, Yoav emerges as something close to a Holy Fool, a cousin to Nagel, the lonely eccentric of Knut Hamsun’s Mysteries. He wants to completely shed his Israeli identity and become French—how he even got to Paris remains a mystery—but the only way he knows how is to randomly flip through pages in his French dictionary and read words, then mouth all their synonyms. He chants these synonyms while walking the city streets, and a disinterested observer could assume that Yoav is completely mad.
He is, in fact, surviving as best he can, reaching out to grab onto words as if they’re buoys in a stormy sea. Words also dominated Lapid’s second feature, The Kindergarten Teacher (2014), in which the title character displays an increasingly obsessive and destructive interest in one of her five-year-old students (also named Yoav), whose spare and visionary poetry seems far beyond his years. (In fact, the poems derive from ones that Lapid himself wrote around that age.) Putting aside its dark examination of pedagogical attentiveness and poetic sensitivity curdling into something awful, the film dramatizes the pure power of words to express thought and define the self. It’s not such a leap from the Tel Aviv classroom of one little Yoav to the Paris street maze of a bigger, stronger, and more disturbed Yoav.
The same Yoav, then, in a different body? No—the Yoav of is, as Lapid points out, “not vulgar, he’s poetic in a way,” but he’s no prodigy. Yoav is a young man trying to escape from a condition of what might be called “Israeliness,” what Lapid has previously identified as a “hermetic way of looking at the world” in which “we are in permanent danger and it creates a perfect order.” But in his carefully crafted narrative, whose helter-skelter surface deceptively appears as chaotic as Yoav himself, Lapid holds back on any social or political causes for Yoav’s state is quite the opposite of and, especially, Lapid’s first film, (2011), which stands as one of the most powerful and indelible debuts in 21st-century cinema. In that burning firecracker of a movie, two hard sides of Israeli society—tough, military-trained cops and a bold circle of left-wing militants driven to terrorism—face off for a terrifying confrontation that leaves everyone burned. It remains, full-stop, the most savage societal self-examination to emerge from Israeli cinema, something almost impossible to top; Lapid’s subsequent classroom character study was a smart gambit, turning things down a few notches even as he produced similarly disturbing results.
