Countries of the Mind

Solitary young immigrant men traverse Parisian streets in Na

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My Mirror column:

Solitary young immigrant men traverse Parisian streets in Nadav Lapid's Synonyms and Jérémy Clapin's I Lost My Body, two of 2019's most befuddling, memorable films. 

A still from Synonyms (2019)

The opening sequence of Nadav Lapid's Synonyms bursts with a strange, irrepressible energy. A 20-something man charges through Paris, the camera capturing his long-legged strides and his thumping footsteps. He arrives in a grand old building, finds a key hidden under a corner of carpet, and enters a vast, rather beautiful apartment -- with not a scrap of furniture. Seemingly unsurprised, he is in the bathtub when he hears a sound. He runs out, nude and slippery, onto the polished wooden floors, to discover that his possessions – clothes, sleeping bag, money – have disappeared. He races downstairs looking for the thief, banging on the doors of other apartments. No one answers. He comes back to the apartment, still without his clothes, and settles back into the bathtub, seemingly prepared to freeze to death. The next thing he knows, he is waking up in a large clean bed, having been adopted by the young bourgeois couple downstairs. His rescuers Emile and Caroline – children of rich industrialists who have pretensions to the arts – feed him and clothe him, giving him money and a phone and a particularly memorable mustard yellow coat in return for the pleasure of his amusing, sometimes outlandish company. Stripped quite literally of his past, Yoav – for that is the name of Lapid's Israeli protagonist – resurrected in a new identity.

Synonyms, which won the Golden Bear at the 2019 Berlin Film Festival and was screened in India at both MAMI and IFFI, is a film about a man who wishes to shed his old skin, an Israeli man insistent that he will not speak Hebrew, who walks the streets of his new city with a Larousse dictionary under his arm, reciting synonyms from the language he thinks will grant him entry into a new nation.

Lapid's film, apparently at least partly autobiographical, is filled with anger against in-your-face Israeli militaristic nationalism. But as Yoav gradually realises that France isn't quite the haven of liberty, equality and fraternity that he has imagined, it also indicts nationalism of the French variety – with its insistence on linguistic blending in, its closet anti-Semitism, its citizenship classes that involve learning the words of La Marseillaise: “Let us march! Let us march! So that impure blood irrigates our fields!”.

Still from the award-winning animated film I Lost My Body (2019)

I found myself thinking about Synonyms as I watched another 2019 film about a young immigrant wandering the streets of Paris, this time a Moroccan pizza delivery boy called Naoufel. Jérémy Clapin's stunningly crafted I Lost My Body – the first animated feature film to receive the top prize at the Critics' Week section at Cannes, and now available to stream online -- has even grander ambitions than Lapid's film. It opens with a severed hand coming to life and making its way out of a medical laboratory. Surely this must be horror, you think – and I Lost My Body does have its tense, borderline macabre moments: a body-less hand suddenly wringing a pigeon's neck, or clicking an abandoned cigarette lighter into flame in self-defense against a pack of subway rats. But even as we watch the hand creeping and crawling and dancing its way across rooftops and drains, over pianos and under trains, it takes on a personality of its own. We begin to identify with its search – for its missing body, for itself. We do not tremble when the hand approaches a gurgling baby, placing a fallen pacifier back in the baby's mouth, and then laying itself down to be held in the baby's sleepy grip.

Perhaps our comfort has something to do with what we see in the film's parallel narrative, about the film's human protagonist, Naoufel. Bespectacled, shy and slight of build, Naoufel sometimes seems like the opposite of Yoav in Synonyms. And yet they share many things: an irredeemable homelessness, an emptiness that seems to express itself in a need to attach themselves to something or someone, and a painful preoccupation with the past, with a country of memory. Their responses to trauma are quite different. Yoav is constantly vocalising, telling outrageous stories about his past in Israel, once even presenting them to his writerly friend Emile in an extravagant gesture of generosity. Naoufel is painfully quiet, seeming to relive certain moments of his childhood over and over. If Yoav recites new words from a dictionary, Naoufel listens to old tape recordings of his parents. And the hand – the hand remembers trying to catch a fly.

A hand separated from its owner, a tongue separated from its language – these are strange but powerful metaphors for alienation. We might want desperately to leave our pasts behind, but the body remembers.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, Dec 15, 2019.