The opening moments of Nadav Lapid’s “Synonyms” have a sinister, almost Kafka-esque absurdity. Yoav (Tom Mercier), a young man who has forsaken his Israeli identity for a French one, wraps himself in a sleeping bag and hops along the floor of the vacant Paris apartment where he’s temporarily staying. When he gets to the bathroom, he wriggles out of the bag and hops into the tub, as though he were shedding a cocoon.

But after his bath, Yoav finds that all his possessions have mysteriously vanished, leaving him shivering and naked as he dashes from one apartment to the next, knocking on doors and crying for help.

Help arrives in the form of a neighboring young couple, Émile (Quentin Dolmaire) and Caroline (Louise Chevillotte), who find Yoav passed out in the tub, carry him into their apartment and bundle him in blankets. They’re unfazed by this visitor’s sudden arrival, and their unconcealed curiosity, as well as their flirtation with a certain cheeky-worldly French stereotype, may make you wonder if the movie is about to take a polyamorous turn.

But there is more than prurience in their gaze, and in the movie’s. Lapid, his camera magnetized by the human body whether in motion or at rest, confronts you with Yoav’s nakedness early and often. He wants to familiarize you with it, until it has transformed from one thing, an object of potential art-house titillation, into something more resonant and ambiguous. Yoav’s nude body becomes a kind of metaphorical conflict zone, his circumcised penis an eternal reminder that identity cannot always be cast off like a carapace, no matter how hard you might try.

While most scenes are precisely shot and composed, observing Yoav from a thoughtful remove, at certain points, the movie suddenly leaps into a hand-held frenzy, as though trying to approximate his point of view. The camera swoops and darts restlessly about as Yoav makes his way down the street and along the Seine, practicing his stilted, lovely French and learning new words from a pocket dictionary.

This mercurial visual style makes a strange sense for a character torn between warring aspects of his history and identity, between the possibilities of his new home and the trauma and disillusionment of his past. We see that past emerge in jagged, absurdist flashbacks to his time as an Israeli soldier. We also see it seep into the present when he reluctantly takes a security job at the Israeli Consulate in Paris, where he meets a colleague, Yaron (Uri Hayik), who is his proudly Jewish antithesis.

Lapid extracts some arresting physical comedy here, all in service of a scalding satirical vision.

But your laughter may swell and die in your throat when a cash-strapped Yoav debases himself for a pornographer (Christophe Paou) who has a particular fixation on the young man’s Jewishness. The cringe-inducing spectacle that follows reduces Yoav to a tawdry symbol and tramples his conflicted, complicated humanity.

Yoav’s identity remains a construct of mind and flesh. He cannot change his body, but he can alter his language, and so he keeps feverishly practicing his French, attacking each new word with violent purpose. His insult vocabulary balloons overnight: As he tells Émile, he abandoned Israel because it is “nasty, obscene, ignorant, idiotic, sordid, fetid, crude, abominable, odious, lamentable, repugnant, detestable, mean-spirited, mean-hearted.” To which Émile diplomatically replies, “No country is all that at once.”