Louise Chevillotte

French thriller about a 10-year-old boy encountering secrets among the people who've taken him in for the summer.

Winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, Nadav Lapid's "Synonyms" follows a disaffected young Israeli who flees Tel Aviv for Paris to start a new life, but his attempts to find himself awaken past demons and open up an existential abyss. Based on the director's own experiences, this tragicomic puzzle explores the challenges of putting down roots in a new place.

After a bad breakup, the only place 23-year-old Jeanne has to stay in Paris is the flat of her father. But when Jeanne arrives, she finds that his new girlfriend has moved in too: Arianne, a young woman her own age. Each is looking for their own kind of love in a city filled with possibilities.

Veteran filmmaker Philippe Garrel once again fashions a pinpoint-precise and economical study of young love and its prevarications, which ever so gradually blossoms into an emotionally resonant moral tale. Handsome Luc, following in his aging father’s footsteps to study the craft of furniture joining, doesn’t appear to have any trouble meeting and dating women; as the film opens he’s aggressively courting Djemila at a Paris bus stop. Skeptical yet ultimately trusting, Djemila will not be Luc’s one and only. Constructed and composed with crystalline austerity, and co-written with Jean-Claude Carrière and Arlette Langmann—who collaborated on Garrel’s last two films—The Salt of Tears is a pocket portrait that demonstrates the persistent vitality of one of French cinema’s great observers of the callowness of youth.