He has stories - vague ones - about his life and his disturbing experiences in the Israeli military, and we sense his rage and desire to break free. Throughout, there remains an air of trauma around Yoav. Later, Yoav will find that his body is an endless source of fascination for those around him, including a pornographer who wants to put him in a sexual scenario with an Arab woman. But right from the beginning, there’s a slightly sexual edge to the Parisian duo’s interest in Yoav Emile notes that he’s uncircumcised. For the young man, who hopes never to see Israel again, and who refuses even to speak Hebrew anymore, it feels like a new beginning, especially since Emile’s clothes make him feel like a dandy, or maybe even royalty. When the posh French couple that lives upstairs, Emile (Quentin Dolmaire) and Caroline (Louise Chevillotte), discover Yoav, they give him Emile’s clothes.
He’s also, it seems, ripe for reinvention. The young man has found himself naked and alone and possessionless in a strange new land, at the mercy of the very air around him, unable to hide. It’s a situation that starts off as a joke, then transforms into an anxiety dream, then a dance - there’s a tight, performative grace to Mercier’s movements - and then an existential threat- Yoav winds up back in the bathtub, desperately rubbing his arms and legs trying to get warm - before landing in the realm of metaphor. Stepping out of the bathroom, he finds that his clothes have been taken (we never find out by whom) and he runs, naked and frantic, among the building’s many bare rooms looking for them, gradually getting colder, until he seems ready to freeze.
In the opening scenes of Nadav Lapid’s Synonyms, Yoav (Tom Mercier), a young Israeli man who has just arrived in France without a penny to his name, wakes up in the mysteriously empty, spacious building where he’s camped out for the night, goes into the shower, and briefly jerks off. The artful, elliptical film tells the story of a young Israeli man trying to shed his identity in Paris.
0 kommentar(er)
