This article was published on The Paper under the title " Berlin Golden Bear Award-Winning Film " Synonym": How to Escape an "Israeli Fate" . Reproduction in any form on any platform is strictly prohibited.
On the afternoon of the 13th, a few hours before the world premiere of "Synonymes" at the Berlin Film Festival, I met Louise Chevillotte, who played the female lead, in the corridor of the Hyatt Regency Hotel. , made famous in 2017 Garrel's "One Day Lover"). The media field of the film had a polarized reaction, with at least half of the people in the daily newspaper field the previous night leaving the film halfway through. Shevelot said: "It's great, this is art." After watching the farce in the domestic Spring Festival stalls for a few days, I was at a loss for a moment.
Judging from the results of the main competition awards, the judges should have had some arguments. But in the end, for the third year in a row, he made an artistically bold decision in the selection of the top prize, instead of taking a safe and conservative route. Of course, "Synonyms" is a co-production between Israel, France and Germany. In Berlin, where French actor Juliette Binoche is the chairman of the jury, it is natural to take advantage of it. Producer Said bin Said is also a figure in the European and American art film industry. He has produced masters such as Tesine, Kono, Polanski, De Palma, Garrel, Verhoeven and so on. The works are more closely related to Hollywood. None of these behind-the-scenes non-artistic factors can be ignored.
an autobiographical work
This is the third feature film by Israeli director Nadav Lapid. Its predecessor, The Teacher (הגננת), which premiered at Cannes Critics Week 2014, revolves around a gifted five-year-old who can write poetry and tells the story of his early childhood teacher overcoming resistance to try to protect his talent. According to the director himself, the prototype of the child is himself. The Americans remade the film last year, starring 2017 Berlin jury Maggie Gyllenhaal (Jake Gyllenhaal's sister). "Synonyms" is a jumping continuation of the previous work. The protagonist, Covenant, has the same name as the little boy in "Teacher". His sensitivity to words seems to be in line with the little boy's talent.
Young Joav came to Paris to escape the violent and oppressive conditions of Israel. He refused to speak Hebrew and began to memorize French dictionaries by means of synonymous associations, trying to escape the trauma of the past and change his identity in the French language and culture. From the first day, France has been cruel to him, but he also met the rich second-generation Emile (Quentin Dolmaire) who wanted to become a writer by chance. Richin's "Three Memories of Youth") and his girlfriend Caroline (Shevelot). They opened the door of France for Joav. In addition to the poor material life, Joav often met with Emil, shared his past experiences, and provided writing materials for French boys who lacked life experience. Emile shared with him books, classical music and, of course, material resources.
The script was apparently based on Rapid's own experiences. After his service in the Israel Defense Forces, he went to Tel Aviv to read philosophy, became a sports journalist, and began to write like his father. His father, a well-known detective and crime writer, also participated in the scriptwriting of the film. Rapid went to the country for almost the same reason as the characters in the film, in his own words, to escape an "Israeli-style fate." 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.
To recreate this experience, instead of taking shortcuts to find bilingual French actors to pretend to accent, Rapide translated the script into Hebrew and found people in Israel who could not speak French but were willing to learn . That's how he discovered Tom Mercier, 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 ARTE, France Culture and France Inter radio, and watching French films from Cocteau to New Wave. Only in this way can it conform to the character's psychological state: he does not understand French society, what he wants is the France in the cultural symbol, the utopia of inclusiveness, freedom and fraternity, which finally conflicts with the real France.
inevitable political interpretation
The director is just like Joav, the life experience is too rich, there are endless stories, and there is no need for too many fabrications. But when people face these bizarre stories, they often don't listen to them with relish like Emile, and more like Caroline's symbolic interpretation of them, thinking that the narrator has ulterior motives. Rapide said at the press conference that he hopes that everyone will not only see politics, but first see the film as a declaration of humanity, art and existence.
"Synonyms" is also an obvious individual narrative in audiovisual language. The locations and cities in the film are fragmented and even abstract, with basically nothing but bakeries, subway stations, cafés and architectural details, giving people some hints of Paris. When Joav was walking on the street and memorizing synonyms, the hand-cranked camera not only had obvious irregular movements to set off his mood, but also restricted the camera’s capture of the street scene with a very narrow subjective perspective, forcing us to see through Joav’s eyes. Paris. The voice is also subjective and overwhelming. At first, we didn’t know whether the series of synonyms was the protagonist’s mental activity or muttering to himself, but it covered the noise of the city streets and almost became a voice-over from God’s perspective.
After the perspective is changed from subjective to objective, the camera is fixed on the protagonist again, creating a sense of loneliness and alienation, while rejecting any interpretation other than personal experience. Even the well-known Notre Dame Cathedral has become somewhat unfamiliar under the subjective lens of the protagonist's repeated emphasis on "can't look up". The tourists who flock to Xidai Island 365 days a year are also missing. It was Joav's Notre Dame, and that time and space only belonged to him. Even if the camera was pulled out to shoot him from an objective perspective, the arrangement inside the scene only belonged to his own psychological activities.
But all this may be difficult to convince Jewish conservatives, explaining that these are often scholars who meet soldiers. Fortunately, their media is still reasonable. At the press conference after the awards ceremony, Israeli journalists were in high spirits, and one said it was the most exciting moment of his life. The only time that an Israeli film had won the top three was Maotz's Lebanon (לבנון) at the Venice Film Festival in 2009. As of Sunday, reports in the English-language Israeli media were relatively positive, and the nationalist counterattack had not yet begun. But that should only be a matter of time.
First and foremost is the Arab identity of the producer, Said, who probably knows it himself, repeatedly stressing at the press conference that he is moved by the aesthetics of the work, and that art and emotion are more important than any politics. Said was born in Tunisia and came to France only as an adult. But this half of his identity can't help him. In recent years, France has faced an increasingly serious anti-Semitic threat. The Jewish community has been attacked by both Arabs and white extremists, causing a large number of Jews to leave France. Many of them went to Israel. This kind of "smearing" Israel's film may face the same fate as Maotz's "Foxtrot" (פוֹקְסטְרוֹט). Although it was a hit at the film festival, under the attack of right-wing public opinion, both the box office and the Oscars were mediocre.
According to the report of the American professional magazine Variety, "Synonym" also has investment from the Israeli Ministry of Defense, which may be related to several flashbacks during the hero's service in the film. It is reminiscent of the Russian Ministry of Culture's investment in Putin's "Leviathan" (Левиафsан, 2014). But what Rapide is attacking is not a specific political force, but a deeper construction of national identity by ideology, a dangerous social psychology and collective unconscious.
Dissolve the sublime
Both the director and his father, who was involved in the script writing, refer to Israel's extreme patriotism and nationalism, "This country requires you to love it unconditionally, without any hesitation, without doubt, with complete loyalty, without questioning." This is a kind of Religious fanaticism, and the reason why it can effectively brainwash, on the one hand, is the repeated emphasis on the history of Jewish victimization, and on the other hand, it successfully constructs the sublime of some values through social discourse. Even more sadly, this is not a problem unique to Israel, many countries have a "shamed history narrative" and attack "unpatriots". The identity that should be a neutral concept has been turned into a moral kidnapping and an ideological cage.
In the face of this orthodox sublime, head to head is to hit the stone with the egg. The only effective means is to deconstruct the inner meaning of these values with a series of absurd, vulgar, and erotic means, dissolving the sublime in awkward laughter. There are many comical presentations and ridicules of the violent tendencies and male chauvinism that have plagued Israeli society. Yoav finds a job as a security guard at the Israeli embassy and meets Ole Leon (Jonathan Boudina). The latter has an office fight scene, coupled with Yoav's cheers, that are awkwardly awkward throughout the narrative, satirizing the anachronism of martial value. There is also the farcical scene of Aurelion's excessive display of Jewish identity, exaggerating the absurdity of nationalism and making the so-called sublime patriotism collapse from within. Even more ironically, his name Aurélien is pure French, with Latin roots, and is likely to be a second-generation immigrant, but he is more keen to show his Jewish identity than Joav, who has a Hebrew name.
There is also a more serious "counterattack" in the film, but it requires the audience to think deeply. For example, in a repeated "Iliad" story, Joav sympathized more with the loser Hector than the winner Achilles. The director said that it was a reaction to the collective mentality of Israel that did not accept defeat. This is obvious to Europeans who are familiar with Homer's story, because no one has ever questioned Hector as a hero, and an Israeli culture that does not accept tragic heroes is dehumanizing. The selection of the Hero mythology rather than the Christian classics among the two major sources of Western culture, especially avoiding the Old Testament of Judaism, is also a careful thought of the director, so that the protagonist completely escapes from the mother culture and enters Paris, which must be called Greece. intellectual status.
This disintegration also acts on French culture and collective consciousness, the scenes of naturalization courses being the best example. It was an occasion where the national values were expounded in big vernacular, a set of self-construction and imagination of wishful thinking. Lights, shots, and composition make the classroom dull and lifeless, and the French ideals are dead in the self-constructed sublime before they can be realized. And no one is better suited to perform the bloody Marseillaise than a violently brainwashed ex-Israeli soldier, the revolutionary battle anthem that quickly merged with Israeli militarism. Emile and Caroline's profiling also played a role in amplifying the emptiness and rigidity of the upper classes of French society. Even the book Emile was writing was called "The Dead Night" (Les Nuits de l'inertie).
“I criticize Israel harshly, but at the same time, I am inseparable from it,” says Rapid. “The closer the relationship is, the more critical the criticism.” And Paris is where he “discovered” cinema, where he was The idea of making a movie was born in this city, but also to make a "meaningful movie". Deconstructing the sublimeness of false values is probably the most meaningful film, and a break with his love-hate relationship between the two countries.
identity anxiety
Like most cross-cultural creators, Rapide's best work has always revolved around identity. Messier even said that, in his opinion, the director and the characters learned French not for French culture, but just to escape their Israeli identity. Israel and other kidnapping national cultures are a prison of identity, sometimes only through violence or other extreme means, such as refusing to speak Hebrew.
The director said that language is the only part of a person's identity that can be changed through personal efforts, and we can't do anything about other things like the body. The only scene in which the protagonist is forced to speak Hebrew is not on the phone with his family or working in the Israeli embassy, but at the behest of his employer when he is desperate to be a nude model after losing his job. What the other party wants is the exoticism provided by the unfamiliar language, which is completely consistent with the function of his body. Under the pressure of social class and survival pressure, his body and language were reunited, and he played together an exotic image in the French imagination. The body and spirit were violated and materialized at the same time.
In fact, most people cannot accept the disunity in identity and value, so the film finally returns to the impossibility of completely escaping the original identity. The ability to master "synonyms" directly reflects the vocabulary. French writing has a morbid paranoia about not repeating words. Learning by reciting a dictionary shows an extreme desire to integrate into the local society. Only when the purpose of integration is to escape from the past, Joav cannot have absolute loyalty to the new culture, because he is only loyal to a non-existent ideal, a language and society as a cultural symbol.
So what matters is not which country you go to or which language you learn, but reinventing your identity through life experience. It is a unique, complex three-dimensional identity that does not need to follow the dogmas and rules of any nation-state or racial religion. So Joav's story cannot be given to Emir, not because he is nostalgic and has to go back to Israel from French culture to identify with, but because that is his personal narrative, that is why he is for him.
In real life, Rapide's attempt to completely Frenchize was unsuccessful, and the more fluent the language, the easier it is to be regarded as a spokesperson for a different culture. This is an experience that everyone who lives overseas has. Finally, when he was desperate and disheartened, an Israeli publishing house wanted to publish a collection of his novels, and Rapid returned to Israel temporarily.
This is the beginning of his simultaneous reconciliation with the two cultures of France and Israel, and the beginning of his discovery of his own identity. Today Rapide is a true cross-cultural person, navigating multiple cultures with ease.
Messier can be regarded as he brought out of Israel. This eye-catching young man stayed in Paris after making his screen debut, learning French and reconnecting with his father's cultural background. "I want to get out of this film first," Messier said. "It's such a difficult role, and I have to give it my all without reservation." But he didn't know where he was going, and he didn't know. Where is the next project. Israel, France, or other countries, as long as there are suitable scripts and roles, he is willing to go. He comes prepared and has a good attitude, and the road will be much easier than Rapid.
I'm curious if anyone has come to him for other films after Synonyms. He was a little disappointed to say that he had only tried one shot, the new film "Sublet" by Israeli director Eytan Fox ("My Lover in the Army" 2002, "Walking in the Water" 2004) living in New York. , had the opportunity to play opposite Tony and Emmy-winning American actor John Benjamin Hickey. But the director finally gave the opportunity to newer newcomer Niv Nissim, who is due to start filming in Tel Aviv at the end of this month.
I don’t know if the big male protagonist he provoked on his shoulders won the Golden Bear, will this situation change, but for now, due to language restrictions, Messier can only go around in the circle of Israelis . Even if it is a part of identity that can be changed, it does not mean that change can be changed. I paid attention to the phone number he left, it was an Israeli number starting with +972, and he has been living in France for more than a year...
View more about Synonyms reviews
