SYNONYMES / SYNONYMS (2019)

Forty-something Paris-based/Israeli-born writer/director Nadav Lapid on twenty-something Paris-based/Israeli-born lost soul Yoav; auto-biographical elements inevitable.  (The film also something of a family affair with a brother co-scripting and Mom co-editing.)  Here’s how Lapid tells it: With little more than a stolen French/Israeli dictionary as guide to his new country, Yoav is going for rebirth as a Frenchman.  (Perhaps why debuting Tom Mercier so often buck-naked.)  Squatting overnight in a rich family’s townhouse, he can’t find the clothes he took off to bathe.  Now he’s really in rebirth mode . . . if he doesn’t freeze to death.  Saved by two unexpected housemates, the home’s billionaire’s son and his girlfriend (the only other people in the place), his adventures in assimilation are kick-started with clothes & funds from these fairy faux siblings.  Nifty work from Lapid, with Yoav not so much meeting his future as flirting with it.  Especially the scion who’s already breaking personal space with his ‘guest.’  Adventures in the outside world work best with another Israeli, a political agitator who loudly hums ‘Hatikvah’ on Le Metro, hoping to provoke an incident.  Yoav, who’s sworn off Hebrew, watches in horror & delight.  And there’s citizenship school, too.  But Lapid pushes too hard with a soft-porn photo-shoot (Yoav raising funds); a move to enter the Foreign Legion (?), and reverse-snobbery at the chamber orchestra concert of the girlfriend who’s been bequeathed to him.  Has Yoav gone a bit mad or are his true (terribly confused) colors simply coming out.  A surprise meeting with Dad suggests a way out, but damn if anyone will take it.*

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Lapid's alter-ego’s personal journey thru Statehood, Politics & aversion to his past is less interesting and less well-handled than the menage-a-trois set-up suggested here.  You’ll find that story developed in the most sophisticated manner imaginable in Bernardo Bertolucci’s underrated THE DREAMERS/’03.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/03/dreamers-2003.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Perhaps Lapid is yet another auteur, loaded with talent in handling cast, crew & camera, whose work might benefit with an outside pair of eyes holding the purse strings and sometimes saying, ‘No.’