Synonyms

Israeli writer/director Nadav Lapid makes tough stories about obsessives: The Policeman, The Kindergarten Teacher and now Synonyms. The latter became Israel’s first winner of the Golden Lion as Best Feature at the 2019 Berlin International Film Festival. 

The film centers on a compelling example of the traumatic effect Israel’s 70 years of defensive war has had on its citizens, its soldiers and their families. 

Hero Yoav is an Israeli who has fled his national home in revulsion. He is the new version of The Wandering Jew. The new model is a strapping virile sabra with a lip-ring. The Jewish homeland has failed him, he contends. There’s a quiet irony here: at a time when Jews find a resurgent antisemitism in France and are fleeing to Israel, our hero flees the homeland to Paris.

Yoav begins anew in an empty Paris flat. A robbery leaves him stripped to Lear’s “bare forked animal.” He is saved from freezing to death by a wealthy industrialist’s son Emile and his oboist partner Caroline. Yoav has to rebuild himself anew.

Emile dresses and supports Yoav, eventually arranging for him to marry Caroline and to begin the process of becoming a French citizen. In the citizenship class Yoav sings La Marseillaise with a rebel-to-the-ramparts gusto. But when the students are asked to sing their native anthems he mechanically rushes out the words of Hatikvah, sans music and commitment. His conversion of nationality seems true.

That nearly mortal freeze becomes Yoav’s primary characterization. He tells his new friends his father froze to death in a remote Israeli military post during a blizzard. (The father appears later, hoping to bring his son back home. He leaves assured he can tell Yoav’s mother he has seen their son and he is alright.) Yoav tells Emile he himself almost froze to death when he got lost in a blizzard at that same outpost. 

That freeze of course is a metaphor for the frozen heart, the coldness that characterizes someone who has lost empathy for others. For Lapid as for many thinkers on the Israeli Left, Israel’s constant struggle to survive has turned her callous, cruel, harsh in its treatment of its Muslim citizens and neighbours. Israel’s military has cost the nation its soul, however its root in those neighbours’ determination to destroy the Jewish state.  

Yoav’s hatred of Israel becomes self-loathing. He abases himself by eating the cheapest food he can get from the cheapest supermarket. He sells himself as a “model” to an artist who films him in sexual self-abuse. 

The artist’s partner Yasmine is the film’s one Palestinian. She has settled nicely into the European freedom, living stylishly with the questionable artist, but retaining the bigotry that defines her nationalism: “I can’t talk to you.”   

Yoav finds that imported intransigence among the Jews at his second job, with the security staff at the Israeli embassy. As in the army, his colleagues indulge their power over others. They send away a workman because his helper son didn’t bring his ID. 

Yoav is fired when he wildly lets the entire line-up of immigration applicants  “cross the border” without interview or process, in order to get them out of the rain. This is the humane behaviour that should overrule Israel’s security concerns. (It may work better in Paris than at the Gaza border.) 

Though more orderly than Yoav, his colleagues prove personally worse. One participates in a furtive gang-war with neo-Nazis, flaunting a photo of the wolf-hound he tore apart. Another asserts his Jewishness belligerently, as if daring people to assault him. He aggressively hums Hatikvah in the faces of innocent Metro passengers. There and in the civilized bar, the Parisians deny him any response.

Yoav’s more civilized friend lives idly off his factory and struggles to become a writer. Emile has to drink to overcome his fear of writing. Short on imagination, he uses some of the stories Yoav spins. Yoav first gifts him those tales, then asks for them back when he resolves  to become French. 

One tale is especially fertile in its militarizing of culture. Yoav claims that at his security job interview, one psychological test required he make up a story based on a picture he was shown. Realizing the need for an optimistic front, he decides the boy he sees holding a rifle to his own head decides at the last minute that life is worth living. But what Yoav saw as a rifle and magazine was actually a violin and bow. His calculated optimism betrayed a more profound pessimism. 

This parable extends into his shooting range test. He machine guns a target, then asks the officer to guess what tune he was playing with the firing rhythm, again collapsing music into violence. 

Climactically, Yoav takes his violence into Caroline’s musical world when he goes backstage at her concert and both verbally and physically assaults the musicians. Bad enough he arrived late to the performance, causing the whole row to bob up to admit him. He then shatters his relationship with Caroline by brutishly exercising his French freedom of speech in their green room, taunting them with the freedom questions from his citizenship class. His compulsive intention is its effect — to embarrass his new wife and to shatter his new life.

The film opens on a montage of subjective shots of Yoav’s compulsive movement through the streets of Paris. In the last scene Yoav pounds his body and head against Caroline’s door, in futile attempt to re-enter. The brutishness he thinks he was fleeing in Israel is — like its antithesis, the kingdom of God — within him. The Israeli Yoav and the wouldbe French Yoav are still the same Yoav — synonyms.   

Yoav bought “a light dictionary” peripatetically to expand his French. As he strides through the Paris streets he recites lists of words. They’re synonyms when he lists his Israel’s faults, but otherwise they can be rhymes, free association, random phrases. Their point is incoherence. His inner language expresses his fragmented psyche. 
     The film’s title applies the phenomenon of identicals in language to the larger question of identity in life. In France or in Israel Yoav is Yoav, a Jew, an Israeli, ever on the defence however offensive he may act. This brutalizing is a tragic consequence of the nation’s constant need to defend herself against annihilation.