Ever since A Moveable Feast and probably way before that, the expat-in-Paris story became a genre unto itself, yielding hundreds of novels and memoirs — and more recently, blogs, Instagram accounts and lifestyle bestsellers — as well as a handful of memorable films over the past half-century: An American in Paris, Charade, Frantic, Before Sunset, The Dreamers and Midnight in Paris, to name a few.

Yet the genre is not an easy one to tackle without hopelessly tumbling into a Seine full of clichés, so maverick Israeli auteur Nadav Lapid deserves credit for making his third feature, Synonyms (Synonymes), such a unique and bristling take on the ...