Main cast: Tom Mercier (Yoav), Quentin Dolmaire (Emile), and Louise Chevillotte (Caroline)
Director: Nadav Lapid
Synonymes is in French, and it’s directed and co-written by a fellow who thinks his poo doesn’t stink. It’s perhaps unsurprising that this film turns out to be a meandering, pretentious bore.
Yaov fled Israel to France, with only a bag of clothes with him, mostly because, like director Nadav Lapid, he detests his home country and for some reason assumes that I share the dislike so much that the movie doesn’t have to say anything more than “Israel sucks, and that’s a fact!” Boy, Ben Shapiro is so going to hate this movie, I tell you. Anyway, Israel-hating Yaov arrives in France to work at the Israeli embassy – I guess he can’t be choosy when it comes to jobs – and within moments after he settles in, he loses everything and ends up being naked. Seriously. Nice penis, by the way, but I think Tom Mercier fluffed himself shortly before filming that scene because it’s supposed to be freezing cold but dude’s at half mast. Who is he kidding?
Anyway, Yaov is soon taken in and care for by a couple, Emile and Caroline. Unfortunately for them, Yaov seems to be a bit on the mentally unstable side, and you can bet he’s not on medications. Hence, when he’s not regaling the couple with tales of how everyone and everything in Israel is a caricature of every negative stereotype one can associate the people of that country with, he’s berating them for being rich and privileged – the fact that they allow him to mooch off their kindness doesn’t register on him – and eventually threatens to ruin their happiness.
I’m pretty sure Mr Lapid has delu… er, dreams of grandeur with this film becoming a powerful message on immigration, Israel being the cradle from whence all sins crawl from, privilege, or something, but the end result is completely undermined by several things.
One, Yaov is not quite altogether upstairs, which makes him a completely unreliable narrator. All efforts by the movie to make any political or social statement are bogged down by the fact that it’s a strange, unappreciative, even toxic barnacle of a man being the pivot for such statements. Mr Lapid can say one thing, and I can easily counter with the protagonist needing some pills to settle down his mental demons first.
Two, Israelis are painted with such broad, unflattering strokes to a cartoon-like degree that it is hard to take anything this movie is trying to say seriously. If someone tells me to hate cartoon villains, I’d say okay but they shouldn’t expect me to think too much about it or experience any deep thoughts from my action. It’s the same with this movie. “Israel bad! Very bad! Evil! They are all evil!” the movie would tell me repeatedly. Well, I’ll just nod and then shrug before moving on.
Finally, this movie tries very hard to be arty – it won an award for its efforts, so I guess this intestinal gas-sniffing thing works for Mr Lapid – so it has lingering scenes of nothing of particular importance here and there to pad up the scenes. I’m not complaining when these scenes involve Mr Mercier waving his flesh tube around, of course, but alas, he quickly puts his clothes on and his character coincidentally becomes twenty times more annoying to follow as a result.
This movie has pretty people, so that’s a minor plus for folks who just want to look at beautiful people taking their clothes off now and then. It’s also a two-hour plus movie of Mr Lapid forcing the audience’s face to his pucker before letting out a loud backdoor whoopee, so keep that it mind when it comes to deciding whether or not to waste your time on this thing.
