THE STORY – In the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel, Y., a jazz musician, struggles to make ends meet, until he is given a mission to create a new national anthem.
THE CAST – Ariel Bronz, Efrat Dor, Sharon Alexander, Naama Preis & Aleksei Serebryakov
THE TEAM – Nadav Lapid (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 150 Minutes
Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid’s last film, 2021’s “Ahed’s Knee,” saw him raging against the machine with a white-hot fire in his belly. A blistering attack on art censorship in the Israeli government, “Ahed’s Knee” was a primal scream into the void from a filmmaker who has always used his voice to challenge the complacency of his fellow Israelis. In the wake of the October 7 attacks, there’s far more hypocrisy to call out in Israel than ever before, and given that the whole world is watching closely now, it should be no surprise that Lapid is back and that he’s even angrier than before. “Yes!” is an overstuffed, over-indulgent beast of a film, one that finds Lapid doubling down on the rage that has powered his previous work in an exhilaratingly exhausting fashion.
The film’s plot is relatively simple: Musician Y (Ariel Bronz) and his dancer wife Yasmin (Efrat Dor) are struggling to make ends meet despite making connections with Israeli high society through what seems like a never-ending wave of drugs, drinks, and dancing. In the wake of October 7, Y is commissioned to compose music for a new Israeli national anthem. Y and Yasmin, who recently gave birth to a baby boy, fight over whether he should take the commission. He then travels to the border of Gaza to see what’s happening and writes the song. That’s it, and Lapid somehow stretches it out to two hours and forty minutes, an ungodly running time for such a thin plot that nonetheless comes dangerously close to being fully justified by the barely contained rage that boils over in every frame.
The current situation in Israel isn’t particularly subtle; despite the dangers surrounding them, Israel is engaging in war crimes that are a hair’s breadth away from full-on genocide, and many Jewish Israelis flat-out do not care. Since the situation isn’t subtle, Lapid’s film isn’t either, engaging in such obvious symbolism as Y getting down on all fours to lick the boot of the Big Billionaire (Aleksei Serebryakov) financing the song commission, followed by Israeli official Avinoam (Sharon Alexander) being ordered to do the same, creating a chain of bootlickers underneath the money man. There’s no mistaking the message behind these images, and Lapid pushes the scene for far longer than necessary, matching the excessive violence of the Israeli government with his own form of cinematic excess. That excess is evident from the film’s opening moments, a vibrant, hedonistic party that includes a sing-off between Y, Yasmin, and other civilians singing La Bouche’s “Be My Lover” and a group of government and army officials singing “Love Me Tender.”
This vision of Israeli nightlife sets up the film’s most arresting cinematic flourish: Whenever Y or Yasmin receives a news alert about the situation in Gaza, the text is the alert appears onscreen, soundtracked by the explosions, gunfire, and anguished screams of the region, as the citizens of Tel Aviv and other big Israeli cities react with silence, either unfazed by the news or preferring to blissfully ignore it. Given that the country is roughly the size of New Jersey, it’s easy to think that it’s impossible for Israeli citizens to overlook the violence happening in their backyard. Still, Lapid emphasizes just how removed Israelis are from the violence, both in terms of distance and in terms of psychology. His anger at his fellow countrymen is palpable, embodied by the hyperactive camera that follows Y as he walks around with his baby son, telling him how good everything around them is. The camera movement feels violent, an assault on the senses that underlines the fact that no matter how hard Y tries to convince himself and those around him otherwise, there is something rotten in the state of Israel.
Lapid does not mince words, whether in the images he creates or the dialogue he writes. When Y decides to visit the front in order to see Gaza for himself before he composes the music, he’s driven there by an ex-girlfriend and IDF member (Naama Preis) who tells him all about her experience on October 7, listing in stomach-churning detail the atrocities she saw committed by Hamas. The violence committed in Hamas’s name should not be excused, nor can it be forgotten, and the ragged emotion with which Preis spits out this speech is so powerful that it’s all Lapid needs to show the Israeli side of the story. This monologue also includes one of the most astute distillations of the current Israeli moment: “Everyone says, ‘You cannot understand what it’s like to be in Gaza,’ but YOU can’t understand what it’s like to be Israeli,” she says, prompting Y to reply in frustration, “NO ONE understands!” It’s true: No one on any side can fully understand the situation because no one has generations-deep ties to both sides of the conflict. What Lapid has set his sights on are the people who do not care about understanding, those who unthinkingly follow what the Israeli government says while ignoring the truth from inside Gaza. When Y writes the song, he claims to do so in order to secure his son’s future, but Lapid correctly calls it out as an act of cowardice, raining down rocks on Y as he apologizes to no one in particular for his actions.
There’s a lot required of the actor playing Y, and Bronz gives everything he has, cutting himself open and spilling his guts all over the film. He’s incredibly physical, dancing up a storm and flailing his limbs about with abandon as Y parties the nights away. He screams as if possessed, pushing the character as far as it can go without breaking the film. His life force feels like it’s one with the film, pushing, pulling, and tearing at the edges of the frame until the cinematic world starts to bleed into the real one. The ultra-charismatic Dor matches him beat for beat, especially in the film’s second half, when Yasmin starts fighting Y over his decision to compose this song. When she hisses at him that she will use the money to take their child to Europe, where he will grow up knowing nothing about Israel, you feel every bit of her seething rage that this man would do something so ugly. The rift between Y and Yasmin can feel a bit didactic and unmotivated. However, as a piece of expressionist cinema, “Yes!” is less about them as characters and more about them as signifiers of different sides of an argument. Bronz and Dor’s performances fit perfectly into this mold, eschewing subtlety in favor of broad, brash performing styles that are impossible to look away from.
The film is impossible to look away from, with Lapid throwing practically every stylistic flourish he can think of at the screen, with most of it sticking. If “Yes!” is an exhausting, messy film to watch, well, so is the current state of Israel. Subtlety has no place here, and Lapid doesn’t bother with even the tiniest bit of it. If “Ahed’s Knee” was a scream into the void, then “Yes!” is an atom bomb thrown directly into a megaphone. Lapid’s message is urgent, and he has taken every precaution to ensure everyone hears it, except for compromising his vision. It’s certainly not the defining film about the post-October 7, 2023 world, but it’s undeniably the most potent.
