No one was expecting Nadav Lapid to hold back in his first feature since the events of October 7, 2023: The Israeli filmmaker has long been cinema’s most vigorously expressive and outspoken critic of government policy in his birth country, with films like 2019’s “Synonyms” and 2021’s “Ahed’s Knee” bristling with fury and shame over Israel’s national military culture and artistic censorship. Even with those expectations firmly in place, however, Lapid’s new film “Yes” startles with the sheer, spitting intensity of its rage against the state, projected onto its amoral blank-slate protagonist: a self-abasing musician commissioned to compose a rousing new national anthem, explicitly celebrating the demolition of Palestine. A whirling, maximalist satire at once despairing and exuberant, subtle as a cannonball in its evisceration of the ruling classes and those who obey them, it’s both absurdist comedy and serious-as-cancer polemic: as grave as any film with an extended dance break to 2000s novelty hit “The Ketchup Song” can possibly be.
Following “Ahed’s Knee,” which played in competition at Cannes and won the jury prize, the placement of this huge, heaving work outside the festival’s official selection — it premiered instead at the tail-end of the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar — has raised eyebrows. It’s hard not to suspect some level of programming timidity around a film this fragrantly provocative and topically hot, which will likely continue outside the festival sphere. Many arthouse distributors will say no to “Yes,” a film sure to remain divisive even among audiences who share its politics, given its brash, antic eccentricity of tone and style. But this is not cinema made with the intent of being embraced or awarded by any faction: It’s exhilaratingly of the moment and in the moment, a filmmaker’s immediate, unfiltered response to atrocities too urgent to be addressed with tact or good taste.
Played in ping-ponging modes of morose containment and deranged vitality by a superb Ariel Bronz, our hardly-hero is Y (the same cryptic name, though not the same character, as the protagonist in “Ahed’s Knee”), a pianist and performer introduced in the middle of a frantically choreographed Eurodance production number that sees him variously fellating a baguette, dunking his head into a punch bowl, bobbing for cherry tomatoes in a swimming pool, and extravagantly making out with dance partner Yasmine (Efrat Dor). Turns out she’s also his wife, and together they make a living performing this kind of unhinged floor show at private parties for baying Tel Aviv elites.
Whether an ensuing dance battle with a horde of Israeli military leaders is officially part of the routine or not, it seems to regularly happen anyway, with Yasmine quietly begging her husband to let them win — before they supplement the night’s earnings with some three-way sex work for a frisky elderly client in a cavernous mansion with the taxidermied heads of her relatives mounted on the walls. Welcome to “The Good Life,” as the film’s first chapter is ruefully titled — good for whom, you might ask, though you hardly need to.
By day, Y and Yasmine live in a modest city apartment with their baby son, further working as a musician and hip-hop dance instructor respectively. These are hard times for artists, and you take what gigs you can to get by: The title “Yes” is seemingly a reference to the word that Y, in particular, simply cannot not say, at whatever cost to his integrity and sanity. A particularly hefty offer that he can’t — but really, really should — refuse rolls in from a Russian oligarch (Aleksei Serebryakov, most recently seen to similarly shuddery effect in “Anora”) in bed with the Israeli authorities, who commissions Y to compose the music to a sort of hymn to the post-October 7 era. No standard compilation of patriotic platitudes, the lyrics Y is given to work with amount to barbaric bragging over the sheer scale of carnage the Israeli army has wrought on Gaza in the last 18 months: “In one year there will be nothing left living there/And we’ll return safely to our homes/We’ll annihilate them all/And return to plow our fields.”
Lapid trades in indelicate satire for indelicate times — Y at one point literally and lavishly licks his wealthy benefactor’s gleaming knee-high boots — so these grisly verses at first seem a typically blunt caricature of Israeli nationalism at its most ruthless. But the great, gasp-inducing twist is that these lyrics are not a product of the director’s imagination, but taken from a real-world composition by the anti-Palestinian activist group Civic Front. Also real is a climactic music video in which the song is trilled by a choir of cherubic, white-robed children, their faces altered by AI — it might not be state-produced propaganda, but it is indicative of a vicious political climate hard to parody in its excess and extremity.
After the drunken, dizzying madness of the first act, the second — titled “The Path” — arrives as a harsher hangover, as Y, after bleaching his hair and donning unseasonal velvet and snakeskin boots, takes a solo trek into the desert to work on the song. For morbid inspiration, he approaches the Palestinian border, signaled by a grimly hovering duvet of black smoke, and is joined by ex-girlfriend Lea (Naama Preis), an IDF employee who regales him with an exhaustive, vituperative litany of Hamas’ crimes against Israel — her own way of rationalizing the panorama of destruction laid out before them. Y, doing his best to maintain apolitical blinkers on both sides, isn’t convinced; meanwhile, he has the increasingly repulsed Yasmine and the chiding anti-Zionist voice of his late mother prompting him to wonder if he’s said one yes too many.
A third act, “The Night,” sees these conflicting impulses and responsibilities finally come to a head: Y himself may not decide on a clear course of action, but “Yes” makes brazenly clear its own conviction that silent neutrality is not conscionable or sustainable while the last of Gaza burns. Some may find Lapid’s film a hectoring and repetitive statement, but it sets out to be one: Constructed with typical dynamism from the director but hardly as lyrical as “Synonyms” or as intellectually knotty as “Ahed’s Knee,” this is rhetorical cinema that brooks no possibility of being misheard or misinterpreted. Rather, Lapid encourages all on his side to be at least as loud and strident in protest, to have any chance of being heard over the ongoing din of war.
