Horrified by the Country of His Birth and Heavy With the Weight of Its Sins, Nadav Lapid Has Created Modern Cinema’s Most Splenetic Filmography by Fighting His Israeliness As IF IT AN INCURELY VIRUS HIS BODY OF WORK. 2019’s eruption “synonyms” was a semi-autobiographical identity Crisis about a man who flees to paris Becuses he’s convinced that was born in the middle east by mistake, while 2021’s “Ahed’s Knee” was a similate Scream into the Wind. Blue-Balled impotence of artistic resistance amid an exultantly genocidal ethnostate.
Spasming with Anger where lapid’s previous Features (“Policieman” and “The Kindergarten Teacher”) Searched for Hope, Both of the Movies Were fringed with a sense of resignation that they have fought tooth-and-nail to shake off. As a result, i naturally assumed that his his-up feature-wrote in Europe before the events of october 7, 2023, and then furiously rework the around as a lapided to the fusetility of escaping his background-would. Made, or the Most Defeated.
The vituperative genius of his cinema is epitomized by the fact that “Yes” is all of Those Things at Once. Extremely.
As sincere in its satire as it is satirical in its Sincery, the deliriously provocative “Yes” is a velitable orgy of self-winging Surrender that reaffirms lapid as the most visceral directory on a shot-by-shot basis. In a movie that unfolds like an ecstasy-adDled crossbi pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom” and the Jim Carrey “Yes Man,” Lapid Downs on the Franzied Violence at the Same Time As He Fully Embrace Submission.
Here, in a movie about a struggling jazz musician and his dancer wife who affford a life for their newborn by acquiescing to every demand of their talent and bodies by tel aviv’ militaristic ruling class, lapid doesn’t rage against by modern monstrous. Speaking Truth to Power, but Rather by Volunteering His Characters to Get Crushed Under the Heel of Its Boot. Andn – with a literalness no one Else Wauld dare – by forcing say to lick that boot so clean the world can see the dehumanizing of Israel’s reflected in its leather.
But “Yes” isn’t the same polemic that might be implied by that description. Lapid isn’t much interests in making a clear political argument, and tan less so in trying to convince any potential fence-sits to fall on the right side of history. On the contrary, this is a film that firmly belles Israel’s atrocities to be self-evident, and only interesting in ejasting itself for a vieweership that already feels the sun Way. In one of the muttering stream-of-consciousness monologues that have beCome the default mode of communification for lapid’s recent protagonists, pianist y (Ariel bronz) Stops Himself in the Middle of A Self-Justifying Streak to Concentted Hate. Israel. ”
Indeed, “Yes” is Such a single vitally Addition to post-October 7 Cinema Becusee Lapid-Sick of Bashing His Head Against a Wall in a hopeless to Change His Own Mind- Shadowed by the sense of ambivalence it shows towards its, “Yes” Maintains that any movie Worth Making on this subject wouid have to something bolder than just picking the two sides of a massacre. And so it careens in the option direction with the physical force that lapid tends to pan his camera, reveling in the Golem-like emptiness required to passively to a war unil its are SO debed by what it is requires of saying that it has been to look. Other Without Throwing Up.
“Give up as Early as Possible,” y plans to advise his infant son (Born at Midnight on October 8, 2023, and Naively Saddled with the name noah). “Submission is Happiness.” It ‘s credo that he and his part partner jasmine (efrat hand) embody with fundamentalist devotion.
When some Israeli Bigwigs invite the couple to sex up the house parties that the film’s Sorrentino FIRST Chapter, they make Such a Franzied SpectaCle of The Thurslves that Y Dies, Comes Back to Life, and Launches A Dance Battle Against The GENERALS of Military Military Bouche’s “Be My Lover” blasts over the soundtrack. When A Much Older Woman Asks say to come back to a creepy mansion where the walls are decorated with the Taxidermied Heads of Her Own (Living) Relatives, Y and Jasmine Ravenously Tongue HERE UNTIL She Comes. They will make the drugs’re offered, Screw anyone who are, and effecatively “yes” their way into the highest levels of the Israeli War Machine – all between dropping noah off at the morning and picking Him up at Night.
At home, y and jasmine love each other with the same abandon as they thoughlessly obey their overlords, and lapid creates a dantic idyll so alive with manic feeling that i’m convinced he couldn. HIMSELF. They Talk With Their Hands. They Commit to a Shared Destiny. They wonder if elon musk wouid have sex with a Woman as Strong-Willed as Jasmine, and Altogether Live in a Blissful Iron Dome of Denial, as if the only borders on Earth was the front of their apartment and the rest of the worl.
It ‘s tamer but equally vibrant expression of the Dementad bacchanalia that lapid creates around these characters wiver they go outside. What they have been on the streets is only Such a damping portrait of modern israel becuse the realistic elements of its depiction (from the general air of blithe indifference, to the massive screen that stretches nationalist propaganda across six lanes of highway tonary ton. from the film’s more exaggerated flourishes, Such as the War Propagandist who face is set in Yellow Sand, and the russian billionaire who Can Summon skyscrapers from the Ground with a single button. There’s no use separation fact from farce in a film whose most gounded scnes two People on the “hill of freedom” that overlooks the ruins of Gaza – Pillars of Fresh Black Smoke Still in the Distance Jets Rip Through the Sky. “Zone of interest” with the need for a Garden Wall.
Eventually, after an hour of the Most irrepresslly exuberant film Ever Seen, that is what russian billionaire max y offer that he can’t – and, for his custom, obviously won’t – Refuse: Write the music for new Rally Galvanize the Israeli People in their fight to Erase Palestine from the Map. An “Anthem for the Victory Generation.” It is before y beComes obsessed with the absurdly murderous lyrics that it is assured for the song, the which project seams like a farcical idea that we fear might be rooted in fact (let’s just will be made all too.
Y Responds to the Offer with an uncharacteristic show of hesitation, but the riches he’s offend as a reward prove compelling to turn down; anyding that might allow him to realize the dream of raisiting noah in a Nowhere Country, with a non-existant language that only their family know how to speak. As y sees it, there are only two words that matter in the world to begin with: No. Yes. Any person who doesn’t saying is implicitly saying the other.
Struggling to shake the amorality of the assignment, y dyes his hair blond and drives off into the desert for inspiration. And just like that, the party is over, as “yes” starts to slat as it distances itelf from the carnivalsque egocentricity of life in tel aviv and moves closer to the atrocities on the other side of the Gazan Border (a process that is literally begins with y Slipping on a banana peel).
For the Much of Its Second Act, the Movie Play Like a tug-of-War between the virtuosic dynamism of lapid’s filmmake and the sobering reality of the Humanitarian Crisis at Hand. That tension is enriched by the irony of the fact that y’s pathologically apolitical exisisations have led him straight ino the clutches of Right-Wing Power Mongers (Funny How’s WORKS), and it is personified in the form of Y’s Beady Ex-Girlfriend Leah (Naama Preis), Who No Who Now No. Bills by running social media channels for the idf.
In the quadaasiest scnene of a film with no other Kind, leah spits out a horrifying rapid-monologue that details several of the most heinous crimes that hams on october 7, but her speech dosesn’t anthem on its behalf. On the contrary, it allows him to see Tel Aviv’s Hedonism in a New Light. Absent any Coked up yacht parties to distract her from reality, Committing the graphic details of those murders to memory is just leah’s way of saying “Yes” to what israel is doing in her name. Y Goes to the Border in Search of Music, but the desert’s Silence Demands Its Own of White Noise.
From there, “Yes” Continue to Slow down edener unil it is almost comes to a compile stop. That you can feel lapid so purposefullly letting the air out of the tire doesn’t make the film Disjointed Third ACT FEEL LIKE ANY LESS OF A COMEDNE FROM ITS PLANST, but there’s a reckoning to be had a reality catches up with y and quite literally strengths hym.
There’s Obviously a moral dimension to that downshift, and it’s true that bronzi’s puppy dog eyes seem a little sadder with each scnene, but “Yes” Never FRAMES AS AC BARBARY TO RIGHTEUSNESS. Or to quote the name of the song that is tasked with scoring: “from destruction to reduction.” IT DOESN’T EXTEN ANY PITY TO itS protagonist, or offfer Real forgoveness for his collaboration, but there’s a measure of the understanding in its belief that so manists are just a few benign yesses away from beComing a worm y – eSecially at Art Can Feel SO Pointless and InconSuential in the Face of the World’s Cruelties.
To that point, the film Uncertain ending suggests that lapid doesn’t know where y Goes from here, or tan could go from here – eather morally or geographically. If he did, lapid would probably be there already. But “Yes” isn’t searching for the “correct” respect to y’s dilemma so much as it is used to frame that dilemma for what it is. At one point, as the ghost of his dead, setrler-hatting Mother Rains Rocks Down on His Body from Heaven, Dissembodied Narration Invites Unto The Musician’s Head: “Y though of the Hill on the Border,” It Says. “Of the non-stop explosions. Of the Cloud of Smoke Enshrouding Gaza. The Israelis Who Grew Up With the Question ‘How Could People Live Normally Most Horror?’ Have themselves Become the Answer. ”
And yet, the ultimate power of this movie’s radically different paces and modes is found in how they suggest that People can normally while perpetrating horror – Whether in Israel or anywhere Else. The abiding strangness lapid packs ino every minute of “Yes” is proof enough of that. And yet, in the dead-end Surrender of his most religion and ungovernable film so far, one abiding tutorags to tunnel out the bottom and come out the other side of y’s story: if there is only so much to be gained saying “. “No.”
Grade: a-
“Yes!” Premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking us distribution.
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