In the face of ongoing, ever-intensifying genocide, nuance is arguably out of order, and so agit-prop wisdom becomes a creative’s necessary juice. But for Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid, most well-known internationally as one of the nation’s harshest critics, agitation comes as second nature. Though Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians have been committed with impunity ever since its founding in 1948, its retaliation against the offensive perpetuated by militant group Hamas on October 7, 2023, has plumbed new depths of depravity — and is rightly condemned for it. Lapid, having fervently opposed Israel’s moral and cultural bankruptcy with such films as 2019’s Synonyms and 2021’s Ahed’s Knee, has presently concocted a highly toxic artistic statement on impotence with Yes!, an unwieldy behemoth clocking in at 150 minutes and extolling the dumb virtues of submission.
Conceived before 2023 but heavily reworked to render the hellish aftermath of October 7, Yes! makes its anti-Zionist stance unreservedly clear from start to finish. Clear, in Lapid’s playbook, is nonetheless cribbed from a state of mind, which is anything but: the film opens with a menagerie of grotesque exhibition, its perverted excesses doubled down on as Lapid unleashes the fury and irresponsibility of life in Tel Aviv as perceived through a prism of wanton subjectivity. Y (Ariel Bronz), a jazz pianist by day, hustles by night: smeared in fruit punch and dunked into a pool at a drug-fuelled party with Israel’s military elite in attendance, he and his dancer partner, Yasmine (Efrat Dor), contract their bodies in service of all manner of debauchery — a tongue-in-ear threesome being one of the film’s most overt scenes — and sell their souls to the state for a chance at leaving it. A sea of green somewhere in Europe, Yasmine contends, would befit their year-old son compared to the gleaming but soulless metropolis of greater Israel. Y is less optimistic, strolling along the promenade with the baby and gesturing with wry resignation around at the good soldiers and citizenry. “Submission,” he avers, “is happiness.”
This self-negating tendency foregrounds the aggressively emotive bravura of Yes!, whose paradoxically sincere and ironic dispositions are never quite resolved by its howls and jabs of garish obscenity. As both the film’s subject and its conditions of production, Y’s artistic impotence is very much the point of a work which proves irreducible to either phenomenological expression or symbolic meaning. But Lapid, arguably, does more to presuppose this representational handicap than to depict it, and his insistent solipsism tunes out the film’s inescapable clarion call as a result. An abstraction both in name (Y’s Hebrew translation, yodh, interestingly approximates the German Jude) and in person, Y lives and breathes very much in unreality, shuttered off to cocktail parties with monstrous Russian billionaires and returning to an apartment where music — loudly blasted, never mind what kind — keeps the couple’s national conscience at bay. Whether this unreality is the schizophrenic state of life in Israel isn’t the point; the focal point of Yes! lies, instead, in its obsessions with metaphor and maximalism.
As with Synonyms and Ahed’s Knee, Lapid’s latest rebuke to the state he has since renounced works precisely because of these obsessions. Yet the way the film wears and beats its audience down lacks the finesse that one might come to expect from a director no stranger to smuggling subtlety under the cover of rabid bluntness. A blood-stained sheet containing the lyrics to a genocidal anthem Y is commissioned to write, or a boot-licking circle jerk among the echelons of cowering sycophants, are simultaneously forceful and formulaic, and where this combination may have pulverized the viewer’s sensibility in Starship Troopers, the jingoisms inherent to Israel’s national identity here are not remotely steeped in sci-fi fantasy. That the film’s main backer — the Israel Film Fund — has actually been independent from state funding for some time should also be a mitigating fact against the shock and awe towards the very notion of an Israeli film being critical of Zionism.
One of Yes!’s most chilling sequences, however, sees Y accompany an old flame (Naama Preis) to the Gazan border where she, now working as an interpreter and propagandist for the Israel Defence Forces, belts out a lament for the victims of October 7, her tone and pitch intensifying as the acrid details of destruction pile upon the audio mix. Y, subsequently, heads into the distance, where the backdrop of Gaza under live siege is apparent, and hurls his anthem of retribution toward Gaza in a pathetic display of the death drive. The raw documentary power of this sequence needs little narrative dressing, all the more with the anthem’s derivation from a very real music video sung by kids calling for a wholesale Palestinian wipeout. But little else, regrettably, offers such abject terror in a film otherwise content with provocative but pointless dashes of surrealism. Like the balmy soul tunes of “Lovely Day” in Ahed’s Knee, much of Yes! has already accepted the victory march of vulgarity from the get-go, and a stronger film — one with an even greater aptitude and moral responsibility — would peel off the shtick of sound and fury and learn to say “no!”
Published as part of Cannes Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 4.
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