Synonyms

“I can play a machine gun like Pink Floyd.” The minute I heard that line I knew I’d stumbled into a MAD movie satire populated by Mort Drucker caricatures! Yoav (Tom Mercier), an Israeli ex-soldier newly immigrated to Paris, staggers into a vacant apartment, disrobes and begins masturbating before he hears a commotion and finds that someone has stolen his clothes! Now if that ain’t “Porky in Wackyland,” what is? Returning naked, with no heat, Yoav slips into hypothermia before his neighbors Emile (Quentin Dolmaire) and Caroline (Louise Chevilotte) find him and nurse his wounds in this maddening film by an Israeli director who admits that he, too, left Israel due to its very existence as the embodiment and shaper of “Israeliness”(?) Echoing the director’s sentiments, Yoav is repelled enough to call his homeland “evil,” “despicable” and “disgusting,” among other unflattering adjectives. He hopes to be immersed in Francophilia…without acknowledging that anti-Semitism is flourishing in his adopted country! A really stupid fucking film!

[NR]