None belong to you.
-Joab
The hero's name is Yoav (Joab). This male name so common in Israel inevitably became a label for the place where he was born. In addition, Yoav originally means "Jehovah-fathered". In the Bible, he is the son of David's sister Zeruiah, and is also the brave and skilled commander of David's army, but he is capricious and scheming outside the battlefield. The villain was finally killed by Solomon at David's command. Of course, the character of this Joab has nothing to do with the protagonist of the film, and to put it bluntly, he shares both ends of the leverage.
The film does not put any distinct character in Yoav. He is like a thick glass jar containing stories, languages, and ways of thinking, trying to empty himself to understand and accept everything around him. What we see is just uprightness and even stubbornness, determination and recklessness, just like the "rough" camera language of the film, running and jumping with panting, or acting as the eyes of the protagonist, or colliding close to his beautiful body.
-completely
Yoav was eager to change his identity and become fully French, so he voluntarily gave up his language from the moment he arrived in Paris. And before the new life began, he was forced to give up the material composition of his personal life. The theft of luggage and clothing is no less than the loss of theft at home, and the damage value must be multiplied. After all, if you are determined to leave the place where you have grown up for many years, the things you choose to carry with you are probably the most accustomed or most cherished. It has a meaning that cannot be underestimated. Of course, it may also be a cheap and easy to throw away practical commodity, but whether it is precious or cheap, the loss of these items will eventually cut off the real connection between the protagonist and his past life. The only one left is himself.
In fact, the protagonist can even change his own name, but I don't know why he didn't. The clean and frozen body in the bathtub is like being born again, and the shot that is lifted out even reminds a series of paintings on the theme of mourning Christ.
The process is undoubtedly ceremonial. The male protagonist not only received real help, but also seemed to have gained the generous acceptance and sincere friendship of the French elite, and more importantly, the yellow coat from Emile. Regardless of whether the subsequent deepening of engagement is the aftermath of a fascination with a beautiful carcass or the need for identity stories and psychological material, Yoav's relationship with the target country has undoubtedly heated up too quickly.
Yoav, wearing a yellow coat, is no different from a local walking on the streets of Paris. In his mind, there are French words that are repeated and stacked like rosary beads, but when he takes off his coat, he returns to the identity represented by his name and faces the bottom layer. Disorder, crisis, and extreme economic and spiritual poverty in the lives of outsiders. The daily repetition of tomato pasta dinner and potato chips dessert, all the ingredients are the cheapest items from the cheapest supermarket in the city, and the total price does not exceed 1.5 euros.
But "poor" is a very subjective word. We can't say that Yoav, who walks on the street but doesn't want to look at the surrounding cityscape, is wasting the beauty of Paris and the lack of feeling, because he thinks that only when he is not disturbed by these external appearances can he see what a city really looks like . Perhaps he is more accessible to language, and the synonyms he recites in succession are fulfilling because of the intensity of the will.
The whole world is a text, and words are an inescapable necessity. If you want to get rid of one, you have to go your own way and exchange it for another.
And words define you unknowingly. Words that fascinate you, words that are easy to remember, and words that awaken your associations are all blank, reflecting the broken parts of your mind. Remember when Yoav and Emile chatted with a long list of derogatory terms to describe Israel, and the latter only whispered that it is impossible for a country to have all of these characteristics at the same time. In fact, they can be used to describe any country, and how vivid and how much depends entirely on the individual who gets these feelings.
-Language lessons
If in the first half of the film, language is a mysterious symbol of ideal identity and a new tool for telling distant stories for Yoav, the naturalization language training course that begins in the second half of the film is in a bright and clean classroom, simplifying language into A thoughtless propaganda slogan.
This simplification is simultaneously absurd and unavoidably true. As we all know, the mastery of language directly determines the complexity of the ideas that can be expressed, and even affects the way of thinking. Dovlatov once said that when we use a foreign language, we lose 80 percent of our selves, as well as our ability to joke and satirize. In the past, I used to say that we have several different personalities, Chinese personalities, Russian personalities, etc. Even if the former has all the experience and potential required for rational dialectics, when the latter is awakened, we are quickly pulled back to childhood , Right and wrong with a big pen, with a firm tone like a three-year-old child. I want it, I don't want it, I love it, I don't love it, I am, I'm not; or do true or false like in the film; to describe why a rooster is a French rooster, as if no other country's rooster can be justified rooster.
- Notre Dame Cathedral
Therefore, does the so-called "true appearance" exist? Overcomplicated feelings and oversimplified conclusions are not what we want to understand.
The crampedness of the shot represents the way the protagonist feels about the surrounding space, while the imagery when telling the story of Israel appears relatively peaceful and the atmosphere tends to be warmer. The cramped reality of this scene finally ends in the shattering of a "myth", or the moment when the hero asks Emile to return to his story. No matter how hard he tries to block his resistance, his origin is an icy label that cannot be escaped, but his memory approaches the warm reality because of the individualized details, making him return to "me". At this time, he was finally different from the haste before, solemnly and slowly looking up at Notre Dame Cathedral, calm and even wanton. At that time, there was no one around, the lights were out, and the church in front of me was a silent high wall.
So when Yoav refused to act as a flat label and participated in life as a living and thinking person, questioning life, the generous and humane side of the city suddenly closed the door to him. Interestingly, he also revealed in his emotional outbursts what he really couldn't get out of the label - after a rough communication with the symphony was coldly rejected, he angrily shouted: "Look, a That's how a wife talks to her husband." If the film had ended here, Caroline turned backstage after the scene, holding up his face affectionately and pitifully.
The narrative at the end of the film presents a stalemate of neutrality, pushing the abruptly intensified conflict to the final door-banging scene, extending the helpless insensitivity to the vast intercultural space outside the work.
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