When Yes, the new movie by Nadav Lapid, which just had its Israeli premiere at the Jerusalem Film Festival on Sunday night, got slow – and that happened quite a few times during its 150-minute running time – I passed the time by imagining Culture Minister Miki Zohar watching it, and scrambling for what he would say when the reviews come out on Monday and he has to justify how some money from the publicly financed Israel Film Fund made its way into the budget.
There will definitely be an outcry, because this is a movie engineered to its every last frame to offend the government, as well as just about everyone else who has ever called Israel home. Zohar will likely spring into action and threaten to ban it, providing it with more attention and a wider audience than if it were simply to show in art colleges and other cultural institutions like the Jerusalem Cinematheque. Everyone will play their part and the saga is just beginning.
But what is it about Yes that will trigger such a response?
First, all eyes are on Lapid, because he has overtaken Amos Gitai as Israel’s best-regarded filmmaker abroad. His last two films, Synonyms, about an alienated Israeli in Paris, won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, and Ahed’s Knee, about an alienated Israeli raging about all he loathes, won the Jury Prize at Cannes.
But when the reviews came out following his latest movie’s out-of-competition international premiere at the Cannes Film Festival last spring, I sensed some befuddlement, as if the reviewers there wanted to like it, but couldn’t quite get what it was all about.
That won’t be a problem with Israeli audiences. Love it or hate it, they’ll get it.
In his opening remarks before the movie, Lapid said disingenuously that he has no idea what the movie is about, but that “It’s about having this basic human instinct… about how human beings should treat other human beings, that we lack so much with these unforgivable crimes that we are committing while we speak, in Gaza.” That’s what the movie is about. The script was reportedly written before the war but was then retooled to reference it extensively.
Reflecting Israeli complacency about the war
The movie eviscerates what its creator sees as widespread complacency about the war and intolerable government propaganda justifying it. Everyone is complicit, and as far as I could read a coherent message from the plot, it all goes back to Israel’s original sin of existing in the first place.
Early on in the film, the protagonist, Y. (Ariel Bronz), talks about what Israelis experienced on October 7 and wonders what his late mother, who died a painful death from cancer, would have made of how Israelis were terrified, went to fight, and found a sense of unity in helping each other. Would she have felt any sympathy, he wonders, then answers his own question – no, she would have been indifferent to the “whining of the occupiers.”
At this point in the screening, a man in the audience called out that it was a disgusting film and left, as others shouted him down, a rare event at the Jerusalem Cinematheque.
Y. is an uninspired jazz musician, and his wife, Yasmine (Efrat Dor), is a dancer who teaches at a gym, two artists struggling to make a living in Tel Aviv, deep in the so-called “bubble.” They receive reports of deaths in Gaza on their phones, but they ignore them. They make their real money as entertainers at Rabelaisian revels, where scantily clad beauties gyrate to pounding music to entertain the very rich. The film opens with one such party, where an ultra-Orthodox man is seen bopping along with the rest of the partygoers. This first section, given the heavily ironic title, “The Good Life,” shows everything about Tel Aviv as impossibly ugly and decadent.
Cultural influences in the film
While in many of Lapid’s earlier films, he seemed to be channeling the most pretentious, least entertaining late films by Jean-Luc Godard, here he mixes in an homage to the work of Federico Fellini, especially his joyless later movies, in which he luxuriates in the details of libertine entertainments while at the same time appearing to censure them.
In the frenzied opening, which sets the tone for all that follows, the IDF chief of staff and his retinue sing and dance to “Love Me Tender,” while the vile rich guests get their kicks as a man dunks Y.’s head into various liquids and dips, nearly killing him. Y. escapes by jumping into a pool filled with orange balls, until the gorgeous, model-like Yasmine strips off her minidress and jumps in to save him. Like much of the film, which was photographed by Shai Goldman, it’s visually arresting. The couple finishes off the evening by sexually servicing an older woman, and in another scene, Yasmine snorts lines of cocaine off the naked rear ends of two middle-aged people, seen in close up.
Still reading? So, Tel Aviv is the Roman Empire, if I read it this right, where artists have to whore themselves to raise their baby, Noah. There were a couple of lines with the baby that I thought referenced Alain Tanner’s Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (1976), a much kinder, gentler movie about working-class people trying to live meaningful lives, and I hoped that the movie would veer off into imitating that film, but it didn’t.
At one of the parties, Y. meets Avinoam (Sharon Alexander), a “PR guru” for the government, who gives this humiliated party clown the task of writing a new wartime anthem. What Y. comes up with is a reworking of “Hareut,” the beloved Haim Gouri poem set to music by Sasha Argov and often performed at memorial ceremonies. His new version is all about annihilating all Gazans and at the end, the film notes that a government version of “Hareut” was recorded with these incendiary new lyrics was performed by children after October 7, although in the beginning, there’s a title where he warns he will be taking liberties with this song.
Later, Y. runs to see Lea (Naama Preis), his earnest childhood sweetheart whom I think is meant to represent those left-wing Israelis so square, clueless, or hypocritical that they continue to be upset by the October 7 massacre. She recites the details of the killings and trumpets Israeli victimhood in kind of a cultish chant to justify the deaths in Gaza. A detail or two is changed in each of the stories Lea tells, but one sounds a great deal like what happened to the Tassa family. That real people were killed here and that others sincerely mourn them is not possible in the universe that Lapid has wrought.
After introducing Lea, Lapid lapses back into his late-Godard homage mode of having people rant as they walk through the desert, in this case, along the Gaza border, with Y. mumbling about the massacre like an agitprop soundtrack to soothe his conscience.
The ideas Lapid is grappling with
What I think Lapid is trying to grapple with here, however clumsily and arrogantly, is the cognitive dissonance of life in Israel that has intensified since the war began, where we hear reports that civilians are being killed in Gaza, and we go on with our lives.
You would never guess from this movie that hundreds of thousands come out every Saturday night to call for the release of the hostages and for a ceasefire, some holding pictures of children killed in Gaza. You also wouldn’t guess that much of the media, including this newspaper, has frequently called for a ceasefire and criticized the way that the government is waging the war, questioning whether enough has been done to minimize civilian casualties. But you would guess that Lapid is among those who have called the war a “genocide” and that he signed a petition to that effect before Cannes Film Festival.
Yes is all of a piece with Lapid’s earlier work, and I thought that Ariel Bronz in the role of the latest Lapid alter-ego was the liveliest and funniest of all of the previous actors who have played this part. The cool-blonde good looks of Anat Dor, who resembles Candice Bergen from some angles, at least give us a movie-star presence to light up the screen.
Eventually, the couple goes to a party on “the island,” which looks like Cyprus, and Yasmine says she will take their child and raise him in Europe. In this last party, Y. writhes on the floor, licking the boots of an oligarch-like figure, played by Aleksey Serebryakov, who had a similar role in Anora, and is joined by a coterie of writhing boot lickers. Even abroad, it seems, there is venality.
Like Y. and Yasmine, Lapid could go abroad. He could make European movies if he wanted, but he doesn’t. He may be a pretentious, self-loathing auteur, but he’s our pretentious self-loathing auteur, and he just can’t quit Israel. It’s probably because only here will his movies receive the outrage and attention he craves.