If Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris" rejected the "occupation" of Paris by outsiders in time, then "Synonymes" , winner of the Berlin Film Festival's Golden Bear , completely expelled immigrants in space entry.
"Synonyms" tells the story of Yoyaf, a young man from Israel, who left his hometown and went to Paris, France, hoping to get rid of the past, integrate into Paris, and become a "French". Interestingly, the director of the film, Nadav Rapid, is an Israeli . After his military service in Israel, he went to Tel Aviv to study philosophy and then to Paris to study French. To a certain extent, the story of this film can be seen as an adaptation of the director's own experience.
Judging from the outline of the story and the director's intentions, "Synonyms" can indeed be regarded as a popular "immigrant" or "refugee" movie , but "Synonyms", which won the Golden Bear Award, will naturally be regarded by many fans as higher standard to measure.
"Synonyms" is definitely not a mainstream movie . Its structure is loose, there is no clear mainline narrative, and many chapters advance randomly and naturally. The audience cannot predict the development of the story according to the screenwriting habits of Hollywood movies. But it is not difficult to understand Synonyms . Precisely because of the loose structure and even a bit of a stream-of-consciousness narrative method, it leaves a huge gap for the audience to interpret the film subjectively.
Every viewer can draw an interpretation from the film that is in line with their own values. This is like the title "synonym", fans may give different answers to the theme of the film, but the core is similar, all related to the "failure of integration" . In order to analyze the theme of the film concisely and clearly, Brother Fatty only focuses on two important elements, and only does the trick, try not to involve the key plot, and leave more room for fans to interpret.
To deconstruct "Synonyms", body and discourse are the keys. They are the core elements for individuals to establish a self-identity system, and they are the basis for measuring how much the subject is equal to the individual itself. The seemingly rambling story of "Synonyms" has always focused on the body of the male protagonist Yoyav , including a large number of nude scenes, and some media even ridiculed that this is a restricted-level literary film.
Because of the existence of a large number of male nudity scenes, the scale of the film is quite large. The first scene of the film is that the male protagonist Yoyaf bathes naked in the room, but the accompanying clothes and luggage are stolen. The implication is self-evident that outsiders are beaten just as soon as they want to integrate into the new environment. The hypothermia and nervousness put the naked Yoav into a coma, and the representatives of the Paris bourgeoisie, two neighbors, a man and a woman, appeared one after another. Yoav's stone-like perfect naked body stirred up the dull and boring lives of the two.
A rebellious rich second-generation man Ameler hopes to discover the wonders of the unknown world in Yoav, while the mature and mysterious woman Caroline hopes to obtain physical pleasure from this handsome and sturdy man. Young, handsome, and burly, with a military background, Yoav is the perfect creation of militarism, capable of serving as both a physical and a spiritual consumer product, which is why the French couple Emile and Caroline became interested in him , thus to rescue, to give alms to the cause.
You can view the relationship between the three as the tension of narrative advancement, or you can view the two as an abstract concept that carries the director's thinking.
In the film, Emile described French society as rotten and mediocre, and named the work he was writing "Lifeless Night". It can be seen that in the director's opinion, France and Israel are only "synonyms". The story takes Yoav as the point of view, in fact, to prove the impossibility of integration. And this difference and contradiction first comes from the body, or identity.
Yoav accepted Ameler's alms, and walked around the streets of France in the yellow coat given by the other party all day long. Because of the existence of the coat, he can temporarily hide in the crowd, undetected and undetected.
Yoyav looked at himself in the mirror and said, "With such a shape and demeanor, I can swagger like other gentlemen", so the clothes became a weapon to help him groom himself.
In the film, he has three obvious "dress changes" , and he always wears a yellow trench coat on the streets of Paris. And when he joined the embassy security team for a living, he changed into a black suit. Suits are de-gendered, de-nationalized grooming and camouflage. But the director wanted to add a strong colleague with strong national consciousness in the scene where Yoyav wore a suit.
The first is that the two fellow Israelis, while wearing suits, greeted each other by wrestling, and at the same time tested each other's ability to work.
Afterwards, the Israeli countryman deliberately provoked a subway full of French people, proving his national roots, and wanted to use a violent deterrent method to scare the French away, in order to promote his national status.
On one side is a suit that symbolizes civilization and elegance, and on the other side is an act of inferiority and anger. This sense of difference and incongruity ends with the death of the strong man, and the action of Yoav to save his compatriots completely declares the failure of integration. Afterwards, the yellow coat was once again a camouflage for Yoyav, until, in order to survive, he was forced to dress in military clothing for pornographic films.
This scene is even more ironic. On the set, his heroine is Lebanese, and the feuding country actually lives in the same room because of pornographic movies. This made Joyaf extremely indignant and rushed out the door.
An interesting contrast to his changing outfits is his constant forced nudity . Naked exposes the natural form, and also has the attitude of being consumed. Maybe changing clothes is an attempt to get rid of this attitude, but obviously he can't cover himself by changing clothes. In a sense, nakedness is also a kind of dressing, but escape from disharmony. It is difficult.
Whether it was the first time she was in a desperate situation, or the second time she was completely naked because of the filming of an R-rated movie, Yoyaf's body has always been in a state of consumption. And his love with Caroline is actually a French occupation of the outsider's body.
The latter even directly used this as evidence of humiliation, declaring its legal control and use of Yoyav's body in the form of foster care and false marriage. Throughout the film, Yoyav's control and possession of his body is confined to the narrow and leaky single bedroom.
In that amazing bar release, he crawls at the feet of the dancing crowd, and after getting the food, he stands on the table excitedly, throws his yellow coat, and briefly conquers the locals with his graceful dancing posture and curvy body, It became the focus for a while, but unfortunately everything was too short-lived and fragile like a bubble.
Because, but in other spaces, it has always been difficult for Yoav to show absolute control over his body.
This physical and spatial dissonance underscores the difficulty of Yoav's integration into it. Not only physical and spatial, but also discourse and spiritual divisions are constantly raising contradictions and showing disharmony. The great writer Kundera wrote in French in his later period, calling his native Czech a tainted language, but his focus on content and ideology seemed to never escape the Czech Republic. This is the irreconcilable contradiction in immigrant literature.
In "Synonyms," the male protagonist, Joyaf, tries to break away from his old cultural identities by learning French. The more fluent French you speak, the more you emphasize your alien identity. The movement of the footage in the film is isomorphic with the state of the characters, and multiple subjective shaking perspectives turn to objective fixed camera positions, which are like descriptions of identity and body, consciousness and intention, existence and state of "different places", and the "stupid" and "stupid" state of the characters. "Crazy" is a metaphor for playing a new identity and returning to an old one.
Yoav took the initiative to study, bought a dictionary, used a lot of derogatory terms to describe his country, and refused to speak his native Hebrew, which constituted a language disharmony between speaking and not speaking, and also expressed In order to fail to acquire a new identity, it is inevitable to return to the old identity.
Joyav's coming to France to speak French also shows that he wants to integrate into this layer of thinking, as a way to break away from the Israeli cultural background. So even when chatting with colleagues in Israel, he adheres to the principle, and he keeps speaking French and English when meeting with his family. He was rejected because his girlfriend insisted on speaking in his native language for video chat.
But the funny thing is that when he was forced to shoot the video naked for a living, the director asked him to speak his native language to show who he was. The naked body and the spiritually resisted mother tongue are full of double dissonance, and at this time he can only show anger to hide his shame and chagrin, and there is nothing he can do about another failure of his own.
Yoyav could not eradicate his contradictory attitude towards the difference of thinking, which is the imprint of the subject in the deep subconscious . The process of escaping thinking differences created a disillusioned gulf, and he was unable to integrate into French cultural thinking. It's not so much that he can't keep up, and it is full of double contradictions of being examined as the other and self-examination.
Because he has never been fully accepted spiritually and ideologically , whether it is the two middle-class Parisian youths or the tough French teacher, he will always be examined and consumed as an outsider. Sexual marginalization exists.
At the end of the film, because of his failure to integrate again and again, he finally ran away. He had been repressed for a long time and went to the concert of "girlfriend" Caroline to talk nonsense and vent his dissatisfaction.
In the face of his angry shouts, the Parisians played the tune in silence and no longer responded to him. Communication and communication failed again, and it was so ironic. Music is also a language, and it has a status symbol and class distinction. The young people in Paris like to listen to music, and they have a distinctly different taste from the music form in Joyaf's recollection, which also highlights the difference between the two sides, and at the same time represents the difficulty of integration.
In the end, Caroline and the musicians gracefully stepped onto the stage and continued to perform, presenting a movement that only "Parisians" can understand. "Synonyms" presents various dissonances in body and language, and the existence of these dissonances is the reality of Joyav's life. Israelis and French seem to be "synonyms", but it turns out that he is still a Jew who fled Israel and can only become a refugee with nowhere to go on the streets of Paris.
As Lacan's demise of the subject illustrates, "You look like a man, but you are not" . Beneath the floating signifier (body and language), the sliding signified (subject and identity), you are nothing more than symptom and phantom stitched together. That is, your subjectivity is always constructed by the other, and your identity comes from the other, not yourself.
From the nowhere at the opening to the unacceptable at the end, the film completes a tragic circle closure. There is no solution to any problem, and no solution, because there is no better way.
At the end, Yoyav slams the door out of control, not so much a failure to integrate, but rather that integration is not allowed .
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