Synonymes

Yoav arrives in Paris from Israel to stop being an Israeli and become completely French. After taking a bath in the empty apartment where he stays for a day and discovering all his belongings have been stolen, the tale is morphs into a private odyssey from then onwards, in which he tries to stop being naked at many different levels. A similar intuition structures Lapid’s three fiction films: The State of Israel’s violence fiercely determines intimacy; it is a virus, a curse, a programming of the subconscious that strips all individuals of their liberty. simply follows the attempts of a traumatized soldier to abandon his Israeli being. As he’s Hebrew and to stop being Israeli, he forces himself to speak in French and think in that language. It’s an ontological method. Following that general premise, he meets two other youths the same age, looks for a job in the security field, and undertakes a mandatory course to get French citizenship. This brave deconstruction of first Israeli nationalism and then that of the French is like a blow straight to the chest – as literally happens in the final shot – a deconstruction of the hypocrisy in these two states with racist tendencies and the resultant political and police culture. (Roger Koza)

In presence of Tom Mercier.