Sleeping in the bathtub, Yoav, naked as a newborn baby, lost all luggage, sleeping bags and clothing, abandoned his motherland, mother tongue and family, and stumbled to this city.
The beginning of the film is a subjective perspective accompanied by Joav's scurrying walk. The street is dissected in close-up and only the wet ground is left, and the cafes and expressionless faces flashed in a hurry. Crash through the air. The restless footage begins to smooth and clear as the protagonist breaks into an apartment.
It was clearly an overly spacious high-end apartment, and it was discovered that Joav's apartment owners were attracted to this incredible body and rescued him from the icy bathtub. Like most of the middle-class in Paris, the young couple were more prosperous and more deeply in life, one practising obscure phrases in writing philosophy, the other rehearsing oboe and sexual freedom, qualities that made them more interested in Yoav's strong body and Family background, and willing to help to buy clothes.
What does Paris mean, the heights of the free spirit, the historic capital, the holy city of literary tradition, the palace of art or the romantic streets, Pont Neuf, the Seine and Notre Dame? When Joav put on the clothes prepared for him by a wealthy family in Paris and hurried into the streets, he rejected all the romantic temptations of the city like a Puritan. Is obsessed with learning the French dictionary and repeating words out loud. He lives in a shabby apartment, feeds on the cheapest and drab food, and concentrates on disconnecting himself from the Israeli label.
He walks Paris in his own way. The frantic protagonist's point of view at the beginning is repeated. The scene switches from objective calm to subjective agitation. The admirable scenery of Paris is deliberately blurred and cut, which is what Joav is immersed in himself. time. He engulfed himself in the plethora of descriptive vocabulary and synonyms of French words, driving himself urgently, even morbidly, to be French. He describes Israel in complex and vulgar terms, a process of stripping identity like suicide. As Joav's father said: "A person who rejects his own language is killing a part of himself."
In the second feature film "The Teacher", Rapide focuses on the relationship between speech and language from a poetic point of view, and modern Hebrew inherits the artificial color of ancient Hebrew. The artificial reconstruction after the 20th century made the language conjugated with a more purposeful and more solidified religious and national ideology. Modern Hebrew lacks adjectives, so it uses metaphors in the description process. The metaphors full of inspiration in poetry come from this, but the perceptual cognition of life will also be blocked.
The linguistic structuralism proposed by Saussure was the first to point out the relationship between society and language systems. Language is a social part of speech activity, not subject to individual will, but shared by members of society. Joav recited a large number of adjectives, and when he threw himself naked into the deep sea of the French-speaking world, he was also strangling Joav, who was bred by Jewish culture, an Israeli nationality, using Hebrew, and obeying the laws of the country to join the army.
And the country and the mother tongue are never far away, go hand in hand. Colleagues in the Israeli consulate expressed hostility and contempt for Muslims, rejecting any Middle Eastern faces and Islamic names. In the stories he tells in French, fragments of life in the army in Israel pop up from time to time, and he withdraws the absurd from the seriousness of the army itself. The gentle French chanson inspires soldiers to practice shooting. Spicy "Hallelujah" teases the combative masculinity of veterans. The compatriots in France have never forgotten the pride of the Jewish nation. They confronted passers-by in Hebrew in Paris, put on their Jewish hats, hummed the national anthem aggressively, and looked directly at Parisians oppressively.
After many wars in which the nation has suffered devastating damage, militarism and national glory, piety and cultural pride have become an armor for Israelis to arm themselves. While protecting their Jewish identity, they also formed an extremely tough and tyrannical ideology . Just like the story of Hector, beloved by Joav, in the version told by his parents, the tragic ending of the first warrior of Troy was castrated, and forever stayed in the echo of his heroic courage to defend his home and country and rise up to sacrifice himself. .
Not everyone agrees with the blind obedience of Zionism, and young lives are inevitably tossed between the freedom of personality and the destiny of the country. In "Foxtrot", Maotz once portrayed the boring, witty and lovely side of the soldiers stationed at the frontier, and also revealed the majestic overwhelm of the collective destiny community and the absurd and fragile individual destiny. Our protagonist, Joav, is an equally fanciful naive teenager who imagines machine guns and magazines on the battlefield as violins and strings, the horn of an angry bull as a unicorn, and is deeply infatuated with Hector's legend. But no matter how hard he tried to blast off one esoteric word after another in elegant French, he never really fit into Paris.
The city covets Joav's beauty, consuming his body and exoticism. He became the third party in the open relationship between Emile and Caroline, who was tempted by both sides, and Emile tried to dig out his own ridiculous depth from his story; the photographer forced him to use shameful words in the camera. Gestures shouted dirty Hebrew words; he foraged for food at nightclub parties, his body revels in pleasure-seeking Parisians; when he became French, he read out the violence of the Marseillaise The words are no less bloodthirsty than the Israeli national anthem.
Joav moved to France to escape from Israel, and this new country showed not only the prosperity of literature and art and freedom and tolerance, but also class division and hypocrisy. After all, he was not an ignorant newborn, and he was tired of it. Because of the confusion interspersed between lovers, the double exploitation of his body and identity made him even more angry. He tried his best to break free, but in vain, resisting being swallowed by the darkness of Paris, there was nowhere to escape. He couldn't shake his identity or break with Jewish tradition, and even yelled at Caroline "Can a wife speak to her husband like that?" machismo.
When he left again, Emil did not open the door to him again and gave him a goodbye hug. Joav slammed into this door with his own body, but he couldn't break through the hypocritical mask of Paris, and he couldn't break through the Jewish barriers in his heart.
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