Oh, Israel. You’re the one topic students on the Brandeis campus don’t rush to argue about. What am I going to do with you? The truth is, there’s probably no time when Nadav Lapid’s Israeli maximalist opus “Synonyms” wouldn’t have deeply resonated with me. It was the first of twelve films I’ll be watching at the New York Film Festival, but the circumstances around my viewing (early Monday morning) meant my response was… heightened.
After all, this was a week after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised to annex enormous portions of the West Bank if re-elected, and a month after the same Prime Minster ponied-up to our neo-Nazi friendly President to ban two Congresswomen from entering the Jewish State on explicitly racist and anti-democratic grounds. My viewing was also directly following yet another allegation against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh which broke last Saturday—which of course has me thinking about toxic masculinity on my own college campus as well as the harmful lessons I myself can’t pretend I haven’t internalized.
Lapid’s film, “Synonyms” draws a link between these two issues. But I’m getting ahead of myself, providing context for my viewing before providing context for the movie itself. “Synonyms” follows Yoav, a confused twenty-something who has just left the Israeli military and Israel itself. He moves to Paris, with nothing but what he can carry on his back (a rucksack that’s quickly stolen). He swears to never speak Hebrew again. Yoav is a mess of contradictions, a sensitive guy with harmful instincts towards violence and nation conditioned deep within his being—“Synonyms” follows his quest to find some alternative to what he’s been taught.
It’s a dense, and at times, exhausting film, but one I genuinely think every Brandeis student should take the time to see. Put it this way: if Nadav Lapid is so interested in the conditions that generate toxic masculinity in Jewish men, I invite him to visit our campus. That word that starts with an “M” and rhymes with “asterpiece” is severely overused by critics attending film festivals, so I’ll break from my usual habit and hold my tongue. But boy, “Synonyms” hit home. This is just the first writing I’ll have on the film—my full, formal review will be online next Friday, and I’m sure that piece won’t be the last; I have a lot to say about this exceptional motion picture.
With the limited space I’ve got left, let me at least scratch the surface of some of the other movies I’ve seen this week. I really dug Bertrand Bonello’s “Zombi Child,” while Mati Diop’s “Atlantics” didn’t quite work for me. Tackling similar subject matter with distinctly different staging, both movies are about historically oppressed groups—those descended from the direct victims of French colonialism—reckoning with the current state of their cultural history. But for all there is to like about “Atlantics’” moody, impressionistic cinematography and quality character work, I couldn’t sink my teeth into its elliptical, poetic rhythms. “Zombi Child” is great, though (again, I’d say more, but I already have, with a full review coming soon).
Still, I’d rather watch “Atlantics” any day over Dutch drama “Young Ahmed,” the latter being the only movie I’ve seen at the festival this year that I absolutely cannot recommend. Meanwhile, Romanian filmmaker Corneliu Porumboiu has delivered his most straightforward feature yet in the pulpy “The Whistlers.”
But without a doubt, the film I’ve seen here with the widest appeal has to be “Bacurau.” It’s difficult to classify Brazilian writer/director duo Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles without spoiling: the movie is set “a few years from now,” and the worldbuilding is best left to the text itself. But this is also a deeply anti-colonial film, albeit with much more explicit, sensational and violent consequences for the colonizers.
I loved it. While other current genre-fare has critiqued American ideals using equally gory means (think “Get Out” or more recently “Ready or Not”), “Bacurau” is structured in a way you’d never see a domestic picture operate: instead of following an individual protagonist, we follow a whole community (the titular “Bacurau”). Trauma, labor grief and action are all distributed across a group—heads roll, but there isn’t a single person holding the machete. The anti-individualist sentiment is woven directly into the fabric of the film. My only concern is that the film doesn’t have a U.S. release date yet—it’d be a shame if we don’t get to hear the message it has for us.
But perhaps another reason I went wild for “Bacurau” is that its energy was contagious, when so many of the selections I’ve seen so far are so measured. Either way, I’m doing my best not to run out of juice on my end—I’ve been reminding myself that covering a film festival is a marathon, not a sprint. But with so much to see—and even more to write—maybe exhaustion is a reasonable response. Then again, there’s still so much to still be excited for over the next week and a half. Check back in two weeks to see if my optimism holds!
