Synonymes

An often excruciatingly obnoxious piece of work, Synonymes follows Tom Mercier’s Yoav as he arrives in Paris from Israel and immediately begins disrupting the lives of everyone around him. It’s hard to deny that Synonymes does boast some potential at the outset, as filmmaker Nadav Lapid kicks things off with a striking, irreverent opening detailing Yoav’s initial appearance in Paris – with this somewhat electrifying stretch almost immediately giving way to an aimless and aggressively pretentious narrative. The almost total lack of compelling elements is compounded by eye-rollingly inane dialogue and a multitude of overtly baffling interludes – what are we to make, for example, of the sequence wherein a character loudly hums in the faces of various subway passengers? – and there’s little doubt that the viewer is forced to wait patiently for the movie to become about something (anything). Lapid’s refusal to offer up even a single fleshed-out character certainly exacerbates the pervasively uninvolving atmosphere (ie these are all mouthpieces for scripter Lapid and Haïm Lapid’s incomprehensible modus operandi), while the absence of meaning or purpose paves the way for a second half that couldn’t possibly be less pointless and irrelevant – with the end result an uncommonly annoying trainwreck that demands one be on Lapid’s very specific wavelength (if that’s even possible).

no stars out of ****