Synonyms (Synonymes)

Undoubtedly one of the year’s most exciting and unpredictable cinematic rides, Nadav Lapid’s brilliant and caustically funny follow-up to The Kindergarten Teacher begins with Yoav (electrifying newcomer Tom Mercier), a handsome Israeli ex-soldier, arriving in Paris intent on shedding his native language, heritage, and self—for reasons that may be either neurotic, erratic, or perhaps post-traumatic. Yoav sheds everything, and fast: the opening scene leaves him utterly naked in an empty apartment, where a pair of haute-bourgeois and sexually ambiguous French newlyweds soon take him in. But the more desperately Yoav tries to assimilate to his new culture—he tests out his mastery of French in torrents of antiquated verbal nuances and phrases—the more it appears that he may not be able to escape the identity he's fleeing. Winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival and featuring Mercier’s tour-de-force physical performance, Synonyms is boldly iconoclastic: a tragi-comedic social critique that spits in the face of nationalism, whatever tongue it may speak.

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