Synonyms

Synonyms – A Frustrated Wanderer

 A wandering man walks on the streets of Paris. He repeats words and their synonyms to himself, almost like a prayer. We watch this man. Who is he? Where is he going? What is he looking for? A deeply thought-provoking journey, Synonyms follows a man filled by frustration: frustrated identity, frustrated nationality, frustrated masculinity. Nadav Lapid, through this film, exposes bare the struggles that he and so many other people faced with his identity and questions the basis of nationality and traditional masculinity. He does this by creating an alternative younger version of himself – a wanderer of nations – and that’s the man that we see. Through this, we feel more intensely the inner turmoil inside this young man struggling with ideals of nationalism and masculinity. This is a frustrated young man looking for something that he isn’t able to find – a frustrated wanderer looking for the ideal nation.

 We are introduced to this wanderer when he has just arrived in Paris. We see him coming almost out of nowhere, already with a hiking bag on his back. He crosses the street and enters this fancy-looking building. He enters one of the apartments and opens the windows. When night falls, he gets naked and takes a shower, leaving all his things in a room next door. When he returns to that room, all his things have disappeared. He runs through the halls of the frigid, old building in his stark nakedness, panicking. When he loses hope that anyone is in the building, he gets back to the bathroom and tries to warm himself with the water from the shower. Moments later, a young couple who couldn’t look more French gets out of their apartment, having heard the commotion. They find the man in the bathtub, passed out, naked like a newborn. They take him to their apartment, put him on their bed and warm him up. Shortly after, he wakes up and looks at them. He finds himself in an idyllic, beautiful, French apartment with the two most angelical French-looking people looking at him and with nothing left. “Is this death?”, he asks. They introduce themselves: they are Émile and Caroline – played, respectively, by Quentin Dolmaire and Louise Chevilotte. The man introduces himself (to both them and us): he is Yoav – brilliantly played by Tom Mercier.

 The importance of this first scene and why I described it so thoroughly is because it’s an important key to understand the character of this wanderer called Yoav. He left Israel and renounced his Israeli nationality. In that apartment, he loses all of his belongings that he brought from Israel. He is left with nothing of his former self. This, in a way, represents his death as an Israeli and his rebirth. However, what is he reborn as? Is he reborn as a Frenchman? Or is he reborn as something else?

 For the rest of the film, we watch Yoav trying to become a Frenchman. He tries to wash his “Israeliness” off from himself and tries to be French – whatever that entails. Émile and Caroline give him new clothes and belongings – which he happily repeats the names in French as they give him those things. They become close friends – his French family. He gives Émile his last material belonging – a lip piercing – and he starts to give him his intellectual belongings in the form of his memories as an Israeli man, that he tells throughout the film. Because Émile is a writer, Yoav gives him permission to use his stories for his novels. Yoav also refuses to speak in Hebrew. All these are efforts to wash the “Israeliness” that covers him both emotionally and intellectually. However, is this possible? Is it possible to erase something that we were born with and, therefore, so intrinsic to us?

 In key intermediary scenes, we see Yoav walking through Paris repeating words in French and their synonyms. He does this to gain the maximum amount of French vocabulary and, through this, become a Frenchman. However, at the same time that he does this, he doesn’t allow himself to look at Paris properly, refusing, for example, to look at the Seine. He says, that he does this to get at the heart of Paris (this is, Frenchness) without being distracted by the illusive beauty of it. However, doesn’t this make him more a wanderer in Frenchness than a true Frenchman if he doesn’t allow himself to look at Paris?

 It is also clear that Yoav loathes everything about Israel. He learns every possible negative adjective in French in order to describe Israel to others. The importance of this is because it tells us what Yoav is looking for. He believes that everything about Israel is bad and he is looking for the polar opposite of that. This is, he is looking for the nation where everything that is hated in Israel is loved, and where everything that is loved in Israel is hated. He tries to find that nation in France. But is France this idealization of his? Is it the sublime and idyllic nation that he aspires to find? Is such a nation possible?

 Another thing that is important to highlight in Yoav in what he is searching is how he problematizes masculinity – or the traditional ideal of it. He tells the story of his greatest childhood hero – Hector of Troy. He finds an Israeli man called Yaron – played by Uria Hayik - that exudes this Israeli chauvinistic aura, which, in a way, seems to captivate Yoav because it makes him remember his childhood hero. Hector is the Trojan hero who faced Achilles, the greatest and most powerful of the Greeks, in his full wrath. And, although Yoran faces a fate similar to Hector, one wonders who is the true Hector in this story? The interesting aspect about Hector and Achilles is that they are two opposites, or at least different, manifestations of masculinity. Achilles is the great manly hero who goes on a mad rampage and defeats his enemy at all costs. He is the manifestation of an unrestrained and toxic masculinity. Hector, on the other hand, isn’t prone to rages and succumbs to fear when he is faced by his enemy, being defeated when he finally gains the courage to defeat him. He is the manifestation of a masculinity that can’t realize itself in the terms of what is ideal masculinity and is doomed to succumb under more aggressive forms of it. For this reason, we can conclude that Yoav is the embodiment of Hector in this story and this is where his masculine frustration rises from. There is a constant sense of impotence in himself. He is always side-lined to an almost voyeuristic witness of the display of masculinity of men like him. This is most predominant in a scene on the metro of Paris where Yaron hums what seems to be a Jewish song while provoking reactions from other commuters in an insolent display of Israeli chauvinism, and also in a scene where Yaron and another man, Michel – played by Olivier Loustau – fight in an office to prove their fighting skills. In both scenes, Yoav does nothing more than watch and, in the latter scene, do sort of a cheering for the two men. It’s also important to reference the first scene of the film when looking at this aspect. In it, Yoav exudes masculinity with his almost Olympian body, but his almost ridiculous helplessness contradicts with that, or with what it’s traditionally associated with that. Instead of being in power of the situation, he is vulnerable. This perfectly illustrates his character. Yoav, like Hector, is a man with a potential to satisfy the traditional ideal of masculinity (the ideal that associates masculinity with power), but he is incapable of realizing it. He is, instead of powerful, vulnerable. This is reflected in numerous scenes throughout the film. Maybe Yoav admired Hector so much because Hector is indeed him. Both men fail to satisfy the ideal of a powerful masculinity, like Achilles does. They are both embodiments of a frustrated masculinity in a world of toxic masculinity.

 This frustration leads to his denial of his Israeliness, as this ideal of masculinity is presented alongside nationality in the film. In fact, his situation as a wanderer with no nation contributes to his vulnerability, as the other Israeli men that we see are unapologetically Israeli and are able to fit into this traditional ideal. He becomes neither Israeli or French. He is no more than a wanderer.

 Yoav tries to cure his frustration by becoming a Frenchman, however, he soon understands that this isn’t a cure. He goes to France looking for the perfect nation. But, France has the same kind of traditional, rigid and hypocritical ideals. France also has a history of oppression, which extends to modern days, as it’s referenced all throughout the film the rise of far-right groups and parties. As Yoav becomes more French, he slowly more aware of the flaws of French society. He also starts to feel the inescapable pull of his origins because one can’t simply erase where one comes from, especially one’s family. This is represented by the brief encounter between Yoav and his father when his father comes looking for him. And so, this becomes Yoav’s dilemma. He wants to escape his Israeliness, but at the same time he can’t escape it and there’s nowhere else to escape to. In a certain way, his solution is to rebel against the concept of nationality itself. In the same way that he can’t satisfy the traditional concept of masculinity, he can’t satisfy the traditional concept of nationality. This is because, no matter the nation that he looks for, they are always the same. They are all synonyms of each other. They all have the same contradictions and problems that are completely inescapable, and, in none of them, he is able to reach a peace with himself. He is perpetually frustrated and fighting, trying to tear down the door that limits his world.

 This is neither an anti-Israeli or anti-French film, and it isn’t exactly an anti-nationalistic film. Nadav Lapid presents one’s origins as an intrinsic and inescapable part of ourselves. However, he makes us look at the problematic ideals present in our history and tradition. An idyllic and ideal nation isn’t possible because the very concept is problematic in itself. In all nations, there is a dominant class and a struggling class and all nations are based on this same system. The idea of a nation that doesn’t have this is contradictory. In the end, the synonyms referenced in the title aren’t words, but all the nations of the world. There is a rot inherent to the concept. And that is what creates the many frustrated wanderers of the world like Yoav. Idealists or people simply running away from the place they were born in. These are the people who show us the contradictions present in the way our modern world is organized and in our own ideals of what things are. And maybe through this story, we realize that we are all, to a certain extent, frustrated wanderers of this world, struggling with traditional ideals that we can’t satisfy because they simply don’t fit in who we intrinsically are.