A wild, if unwieldy, film, Nadav Lapid’s Yes is a hard, unpalatable work, and it means to be. Premiering at this year’s Cannes Film Festival in the Director’s Fortnight sidebar, it confirms his status as one of Israel’s most daring filmmakers. To date, he’s best known for 2019’s Synonymes, the film that won him the prestigious Golden Bear at the Berlinale. It’ll be interesting to see how those at home and abroad react after seeing this provocative work. As one character says in the film: “This is Israel – get used to it.”
Set in Tel Aviv in the wake of October 7, it’s an angry work in which Lapid’s bottled-up feelings about his homeland spill out. It is also loosely inspired by a true story. In November 2023, the activist group Civil Front released a new version of Haim Gouri’s classic song Hareut that came under criticism in Israel and abroad, when children evacuated from communities near the Gaza Strip fete the “destruction” in Gaza and say “nothing will be left there” in a year’s time.
In a story divided into three chapters, we meet Y (Ariel Bronz), a musician who has a young baby, Noah, with his partner Yasmine (Efrat Dor). They aren’t especially wealthy, but they are well connected. When we first join them, they’re dancing like wild things at a party attended by military personnel, the camera moving in a frenzy. Elvis’s Love Me Tender strikes up and, before long, the pair is joining a wealthy older lady for a threesome at her luxury apartment.
With appetites to match those in La Grande Bouffe, they’re later aboard a boat party, with Yasmine snorting cocaine from the backsides of an older couple. Amid all this hedonism, the war in Gaza is underway. Headlines leap onto the screen while Y and Yasmine mingle with the wealthy elite. Soon, Y is commissioned to write a song, something that begins to tear at his tempestuous relationship with Yasmine.
Lapid isn’t afraid to drop Yes into surreal territory. At one point Y is showered by stones, as if he is suffering a biblical plague. In another moment, the musician is with a woman and three officials, as they all start licking each others’ boots. The symbolism isn’t exactly subtle. But Lapid doesn’t mean it to be. His distaste at the conflict, and those he holds responsible for it, is clear.
It’s a shame the film is so lurid: Y’s behaviour is so off-putting at times, it destroys any points that Lapid is trying to make. But some moments such as the long monologue about the antisemitic butchery of October 7 will rip into your soul. Lapid is vibrant and clever filmmaker. But here, he screams into the ether too often, rendering his voice unmeasured.
★
‘Yes’ screened at the Cannes Film Festival
