At the beginning of the film, Yoav stalks recklessly down the streets of Paris, which seem to have just experienced a rain or snow, and the ground is wet. The camera becomes Yoav’s restless, restless gaze. The spinning and shaking hand-held photography tightly controls the frame within the movement trajectory of the characters. It follows our protagonist, passing the Croissant shop, coffee shop, bank, and building in Paris. , by the Seine, bookstores, those landmarks of Paris. The gazes are then deftly scrambled and edited together in scathing fashion, and if it all seems absurd, it just so happens to be Yoav's predicament. Yes, a moment of loss. The tension of the narrative is immediately apparent: Yoav, fleeing from his native Israel, is bent on embracing French culture and becoming a true "French."
The camera then follows him into an empty apartment. There, he was stolen and left with nothing. He fell heavily to the ground as he ran out of the bathtub and across the apartment lobby, hinting at the deepening of the predicament. The shot shows Yoav's body in its entirety at the beginning, with its proportions and powerful limbs like a Greek sculpture, but such a perfect body is greatly impacted when it enters the social framework of "French": cold, poverty, pain. Dilemma of survival. The male protagonist's physical and spiritual wandering does not end, but enters the next deeper stage: Sisyphusian resistance.
Interestingly, almost every time Yoav walks alone in the open urban space of the streets of Paris, the hand-held camera continues a turbulent violent rhythm, up, down, left, right, without a fixed rhythm, giving people a sense of time. The illusion of being distorted and shortened, but in fact, time has not disintegrated, it is still whole. The protagonist recites French synonyms in his mouth, which are concise and verbose. Mastering these accidental words is Yoav's original way of constructing a language and consciousness system. He needs to use abstract word meanings to embed in the real environment. Irregular hand-held shots serve this narrative purpose, not aimlessly. If these gazes are cut separately, each shot loses its meaning, but collaged together to form a complete visual axis, the audience can better grasp the interaction and collision between the exiled individual Yoav and the non-native language environment.
Yoav is spartan as he walks through the streets in a yellow coat, a strong sense of power, anger, urgency, restlessness, a series of contingency and uncertainty that hang over him. He has been fleeing, from his language and his country, from the native systems he sees as evil, and now he has his sights set on France, the land he thought would give him freedom, where Yoav is racing almost every second to find his own position. But he was always expelled, or never really accepted. The use of the "yellow coat" emphasizes the estrangement and alienation between the subject and the whole system. intractable conflict. Israel's "identity power" was with him, and the long wounds that plagued Yoav were not of his will. An individual's national identity is a law of nature that is hard to beat. Essentially, Yoav slid from one old dilemma (Israel) into another (France).
When Yoav's movement moves indoors, or when Yoav is walking on the road with Emile and Caroline, the shot tends to be down-frequency and calm. Behind the heavy use of panning shots is a rich and open subtext. In a closed space, the transition from one scene to another is connected and transitioned by a smooth panning mirror, which is a kind of respite from turbulence. Emile and Caroline save the starving Yoav's life by giving him material help. Unfortunately, material rescue cannot pull Yoav out of the cage of his mother country, and the relationship between the two and Yoav is actually very fragile, not only unable to bear and bear the weight of Yoav's memory (the story of the army, etc.) Help Yoav go further in his journey of integration into French society. In fact, it was those ancient memories of militarism and the deep calling in Israel's solitude that constructed the cumbersome and hard shackles outside Yoav's mind and body, and its physical relationship with Caroline and material relationship with Emile were impossible. Through the dark tunnel by its own power. That which transcends intimacy (physical, physical.etc.) and exerts greater power on the individual is precisely the influence of the home country. The panning camera exaggerates the meaninglessness and absurdity of Yoav's resistance, and the replacement of the scene is just another attempt full of traps.
The memories sealed in Yoav's body traveled in flashbacks. There is a scene where he, who is still serving in the IDF (Israel Defense Forces), is shooting while listening to French songs playing on his phone, alluding to his later rebellion. This kind of memory is full of contradictions. The two forces are competing. Yoav desperately wants to get rid of being assimilated by his "origin". The burden of memory is an unbearable weight of life, so he does not hesitate to put "memory". "Giving it to Emile, thinking that if you get rid of this connection, you can avoid the penetration of the old culture; but he does not refuse to be assimilated by "French culture". Attitudes, like the splitting symptoms of his dual identities as "Israeli" and "French immigrant", are insoluble.
In Rapide's lens, both forces are allowed to exist at the same time. Synonyms, similar and independent beings, prince, princess, distant and close, the relationship between the mother country power from Israel and the foreign power from France is ambiguous, another pair of synonyms. Even Yoav itself is synonymous, out of control, violent, chaotic, can change thousands of times in a single thought, but different states are pulled by the tension of the same destiny. Yoav's ancestors, the founders of Israel, the so-called Zionists, also rejected their native language, Yiddish. A huge metaphor, projected into the container of France from Yoav's perspective. This urge to separate from their own culture has been dormant in the hearts of Israelis.
There may be a bold guess that Emile and Caroline do not exist. They are Yoav's beautiful imagination, a deliberate link to France. At the end he slammed into the door violently, with no response. Because there was never Emile and Caroline. If the two clashes between the class and the orchestra backstage shattered Yoav's French dream, this time he was completely awakened from his fantasy. It is impossible to escape the ghostly gaze of the motherland. Even though it was in ruins for him, that deep-rooted atmosphere still enveloped his life. He left the place that made him sad, returned to the ruins, and continued his life. But his soul is still on the road to exile.
ps:
The director said: "I fell in love with movies in Paris, but life in Paris is difficult. Even if I speak French more and more fluently, my French dream is getting farther and farther."
Undoubtedly, the director projected a lot of personal emotion into Yoav. The director lived in Paris in the early 2000s, and more than a decade later, the situation is still the same. Mastering or obsessing over a new language can only make you "like" them to some extent, but that's the limit, you can never be them. Language cannot give you a sense of belonging.
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