At the end of August when the weather is hot but the movie schedule is slightly cold, we finally ushered in the much-anticipated film "Synonyms".
At the 69th Berlin International Film Festival at the beginning of this year, it stood out under the "surrounding" of powerful enemies such as Ou Rong's "Thank God", Wang Xiaoshuai's "Long Time", and won the highest score of 3.0 in the field, and won the award in one fell swoop. This year's Golden Bear. The director of this film may not be familiar to everyone, the Israeli director born in 1975 - Nadav Rapid. His previous works have been shortlisted for the Critics Week at the Locarno Film Festival and the Cannes Film Festival respectively. This is his third solo feature film, and he has already won such an award. I think it is no exaggeration to describe him as a genius.
The director was born in Israel, and after serving in the Israel Defense Forces as a young man, went to Tel Aviv to read philosophy, became a sports reporter, and started writing. Rapid went to France for almost the same reason as Joav, the protagonist of the film, to escape an "Israeli-style fate," in his own words. He said he would leave, and the preparation time was only ten days. Without any residence permit after landing, it is equivalent to being hacked in France. You make a living by doing odd jobs. You cannot sign a labor contract if you are illegal, and there is no legal protection. The male protagonist in the film is a man who fled from Israel to France. In the film, he urgently needs to obtain the identity of "French" from the inside out, and the story begins.
In order to reproduce this experience more accurately, Rapid did not find an actor who could speak both French and Hebrew to pretend to accent, but translated the script into Hebrew, which is not available in Israel. People who can speak French but are willing to learn. That's how he discovered Tom Messier, who was in drama school at the time. Messier, who plays Joav, has a French-looking surname because his father is Jewish from southwestern France. But his parents were separated when he was very young, and he was brought up by his mother who grew up in Israel. He speaks almost only Hebrew (poor English) but also yearns for French culture.
Rapide didn't even send Messier to a French relative's house to learn French, but took a two-month course in Israel, and then taught himself by reading French texts and film and television resources. For a year, Messier locked himself in his room for hours a day, watching TV, listening to the radio, and watching French films from Cocteau to the New Wave. This is in line with the character's psychological state: he doesn't really understand French society, all he needs is a symbolic France, a utopia of openness, inclusiveness, freedom and fraternity, which eventually clashes with the real France.
This is also the core element of the film. In order to describe the final "break", that is, leaving Paris, the director has painstakingly designed the story and details. At the beginning of the scene, when Joav was taking a bath, his luggage in the house was broken into and stolen. He chased out of the house naked, but did not know who the thief was. He had no way to ask for help, so he could only hide in the bathtub and continue to take a bath. The next day, the upstairs neighbor Caroline found that the door downstairs was open, and followed her boyfriend Ameler downstairs to check, saving Joav's life. When they were home, Ameler said, "He was circumcised." The circumcision detail implied that Joav's Jewish identity was still with him even when he was naked, and Ameler immediately took out a pair of underwear to cover it. Living, but also foreshadowing the subsequent story that helped him acquire "French" status.
The barriers caused by labels such as identity, nationality, language, religion, class, appearance, skin color, etc. are everywhere. Joav also tried to abandon Hebrew and tried hard to learn French. He bought a dictionary, studied the "synonyms" in the book seriously, and scolded Israel on the "beautiful" Seine because he felt that France and Paris were the only ones. It was an ideal country, but in the second half of this country, he was forced to speak Hebrew for the sake of money, or was naked.
If you have sex and marry a French woman, you may have French nationality, so Joav and Caroline have a relationship and get married, still naked.
The only exposed character in this film is Joav, but the nudity scenes in this film are not pornographic for a second. Every nudity in this film is more like showing the true self, a kind of compelled, This is precisely the most ironic part of the whole film.
In the film, Joav strives to remove his alien status as a form of revenge or healing for his past experiences. In order to obtain French identity, Joav must learn the French national anthem and understand and accept French ideas. In class, the teacher asked students from all over the world a lot of right and wrong questions:
- Your son likes men, his parents beat him, right or wrong? --wrong!
- In France everyone has the freedom to think and express, right or wrong? --right!
- The French code of ethics only applies to French people, right or wrong? --wrong!
Most of the students can give the "correct answer" quickly. But just because you have the "right answer" doesn't mean there is a set of rules behind it all? Is this true freedom?
Freedom, after all, must be limited by the group, group thinking goes east, people can only go east in order to protect themselves; if the group goes west, they have to lean west too. Joav escaped his unfree past and threw himself into what he thought was "freedom", but in fact he entered another kind of unfreedom and inequality. In fact, there is no real free land in this world.
At the end of the movie, Joav finally recognized the status quo and planned to leave Paris. He wanted to say goodbye to Emile, but the door of his house was locked for him, and the long-term calls did not work. Whether he was at home or not, no one knew. In the end, he intended to slam the door open, but no matter how hard he slammed, the door remained firm and unmoved. . . Over and over again, the story comes to an end.
From the first meeting of the two, there is no "door" between them and Joav is naked and frank, to the end of the film, he is neatly dressed and separated by a door, what we see is a clear line that cannot be crossed, what we see is A high wall built between people because of thoughts, languages, choices, identity, class, love and hate.
On the other hand, the audio-visual system of this film is also constantly adding color to the story: following the change of the camera’s viewpoint, the fast switching of the moving camera when the male protagonist walks on the street, the dazzling halo, the violent shaking of the hand to hug the female in certain scenes The brief stabilization of the protagonist and the sudden push of the camera behind the body seem to emphasize the unreality of idealized ideas like the protagonist and the "estrangement" between the protagonist and Paris.
This is a very sad story. Without a mother tongue, a country, and a past, people cannot be human beings; but with a mother tongue, a country, and a past, people cannot live comfortably and happily. The world is destined to be imperfect, no matter where you are. Regional countries, we are all the same in essence, they are all "synonyms", this is a helpless fact.
In the end, I highly recommend everyone to watch this film carefully. In addition to the most intuitive story, this film has many dismantling details that can be analyzed for the audience to explore, although it has some broken narrative and the second half is slightly obvious. The powerless plot is destined to not be the best movie of the year, but it is definitely one of the most rewatchable movies of the year.
This article was first published on the public account [watching a movie and seeing death]
View more about Synonyms reviews
