| Kino Lorber | Release Date: October 25, 2019 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
20
Mixed:
2
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Oct 24, 2019
One word for Nadav Lapid’s Synonyms, a movie with a hero obsessed with words, is astonishing. Other words apply to this Israeli feature, in subtitled French and Hebrew, that’s set in Paris. They include, in no particular order, fascinating, infuriating, frightening, lyrical and befuddling. Plus deadpan funny and frequently stunning as a bittersweet ode to contemporary France, one that’s suffused with New Wave verve.
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Feb 15, 2019
Breathtaking in the way it careens from one scene to the next in a whirlwind of personal and political meaning all but impossible to grasp in full measure, the film is an excoriation of Israel’s militant machismo and a self-teasing parody of Parisian stereotypes, embodied by actor Tom Mercier in this astonishingly audacious debut.
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Nov 6, 2019
Synonyms turns increasingly oblique in its final half hour, as it dawns on Yoav that the door he’s hammering at may never open and let him in. But the sight of this desolate young man strutting about Paris in a borrowed orange trenchcoat is not one you’ll soon forget, nor the exhilarating film that swirls around him.
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Oct 31, 2019
Not everyone is equal, though, if we’re being honest. Synonyms are words that mean similar but ultimately different things. At one point, students in the class are asked to stand individually and recite sections of La Marseillaise. Who knew the chorus of the French anthem contains the bracing nationalist lyrics, “Let us march! Let us march! So that impure blood irrigates our fields!”?
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Nov 12, 2019
Lapid articulates Yoav’s increasingly fevered quest for the impossible through aesthetic fluidity: Whip pans and judicious use of saturated colors, couched foremost in the mustard-yellow, knee-length coat Emilie plucks from his wardrobe for Yoav at the beginning of the movie. It all reflects the movie’s rich and assertive style, a detached cool to hold the audience at the proper distance from Lapid’s narrative.
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Oct 22, 2019
Above all, it’s about the impossible desire, shared by both expats and artists, to forge an identity of one’s own. But whereas the films it quotes sought to create cryptic and contrapuntal meanings, Lapid errs on the side of the loudly obvious, building to a final shot that might as well be a thesis statement for the rest of the film.
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