For a film by Nadav Lapid, no title could be more surprising than Yes. The left-wing Israeli director has, after all, spent nearly two decades as the filmmaker of the great no!—of the refusal to accept or condone the profound rot at the heart of his country, and indeed of the national project itself. As he reflected when I spoke with him recently, “Most of Israeli political cinema is focused on certain political issues,” taking on, say, the occupation of the West Bank or the blockade of Gaza or racism within the Green Line. Lapid is more interested in a comprehensive picture, and a comprehensive condemnation. “In my films,” he told me, “what I aim at is the collective soul.”
In various ways, each of his previous works has brought to life his militant rejection of that soul. In his debut, Policeman (2011), in which a brutal “counterterrorism” unit crosses paths with a cadre of aspiring urban guerrillas undertaking an ill-conceived act of political violence, he presents a grim view of the possibility of political transformation. The Kindergarten Teacher (2014) follows a precocious five-year-old and the teacher who tries and fails to rescue him from the morally deforming effects of Israeli society. In Synonyms (2019), the Israeli protagonist loathes his country of origin and has, like Lapid himself, escaped to Paris, where he forswears his identity, even renouncing Hebrew in favor of French. (In one memorable scene, he studies a dictionary in his adopted tongue in an attempt to capture the depravity of his birthplace, “a state that is nasty, obscene, ignorant, idiotic, sordid, fetid, crude, abominable, odious, pitiful, repugnant, hateful, mean-spirited, mean-hearted.”) And Ahed’s Knee (2021) features another Lapid stand-in, this time a director, who at one point eschews the preapproved topics for a scheduled talk—which include the sea, family, camaraderie, Jewish history, and the Holocaust—to unleash a scathing indictment of Israel. “Suppose I want to discuss a nationalist, racist, sadistic, abject, Jewish state whose sole aim is to reduce the soul, particularly the Arab soul, to impotence and incompetence,” he rages. The denunciation goes on in this vein for several minutes until it concludes with an ominous prophecy: “Each generation here is the worst, and each one produces a generation worse still.”
But in his newest film, now out in a limited US release, Lapid asks instead: What would it look like to say yes to Israel—to affirm the nation’s ethos in all its horror, and at the most horrific moment of its history yet? Yes stars Ariel Bronz, well-known in Israel for dissident antics like chaining himself to monuments and sticking an Israeli flag up his tuchus, as a small-time pianist named Y (in Hebrew, just the letter yud). He lives in a cramped Tel Aviv apartment with his wife Yasmine (Efrat Dor), who teaches exercise classes, and their infant son, born on October 8th, 2023. The frenetic, dark satire, which unfolds in the delirious, sometimes surreal style of a fever dream, centers on Y’s descent into monstrous complicity as he makes a series of choices—including agreeing to write a new anthem to support the war effort—that lead him from the margins of Israeli society deep into the belly of the beast. Ultimately, through the vehicle of Y’s full-hearted affirmation, Lapid gives his most vitriolic repudiation of the Zionist project.
When the film begins, if Y has not yet embraced the worst of Israel, neither has he totally abjured it. We gradually come to learn that he and Yasmine are eking out a living performing for, and even literally prostituting themselves to, the depraved Israeli elite. The bewildering opening scene—reminiscent of the chaotic, frenzied festivities that open Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty (2013)—throws us into a wild party at a fancy home where Y and Yasmine are the entertainment, sometime in the wake of October 7th. Every segment of Israeli society is present at the party (even the Haredi), all dancing lubriciously on the edge of the abyss. During the raucous revels, the chief of the general staff, in uniform and accompanied by his assistants, engages in a sing-off with Y; in the person of its leader, the military is made ridiculous. The couple make a spectacle of themselves, with Y pushing his antics to the point of near-death, almost drowning in the pool. Besides his wife, not a soul lifts a finger to save him; the most basic human concerns, it seems, are foreign to the other guests. Here, as in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960), the vulgarity and vacuousness of a gathering are a synecdoche for the vulgarity and vacuousness of the particular society writ large.
Indeed, as Yes progresses, it reveals a depraved social order. Life goes on like normal—buff men work out in a park, people swim in Tel Aviv’s beaches, the wealthy are worshiped—in the midst of a genocidal war, which enters the characters’ consciousness occasionally through news notifications that flash up on their phones. As it is across Lapid’s oeuvre, the cinematography is guided by a chaotic spirit, here deployed to capture the mania of a society drunk on its own sense of victimhood and mad with power: Cameras are placed in the middle of crowds, erasing members’ individuality; extreme close-ups and wild swish pans blur images and distort any sense of a grounded reality.
But where an earlier Lapid film might show us a protagonist escaping or resisting this milieu, in Yes we watch the protagonist gradually submit to and even celebrate it. It’s a conscious decision: Early in the film, Y tells his uncomprehending infant son that he’s been wrong all along in detesting everyone around him and thinking that to say no is heroic. The real heroism, he says, is in saying yes. (In this, he is defying his late mother, seemingly based on Lapid’s—a leftist who cared not one whit for patriotism.) But saying and living yes don’t come naturally to this erstwhile rebel; to view anything in Israel, much less everything, as positive requires practice. And so Y, as he accompanies his infant to daycare, comments on everything and everyone he encounters, from a passing soldier to a scooter crossing his path, “good.” He so fully steeps himself in the national insanity of affirming Israeli goodness that when videos of Israeli planes bombing Gaza pop up on his phone, he giggles madly with amusement. The immersive practice pays off: At an Independence Day party on a yacht, Y is introduced to a mysterious wealthy Russian (Aleksey Serebryakov), who promises Y a huge sum—one that will enable him and Yasmine to fulfill their dreams—to compose the music for lyrics to a song for a major international event. We soon learn that the song is an openly genocidal anthem, a call to “annihilate” Gaza and its residents. The new Y is not fazed; he says yes.
His marriage on the rocks—Yasmine is sickened by his new assignment—Y heads to the Dead Sea to get to work, and to find himself. His journey reveals further evidence of Israel’s utter degradation. He passes the separation wall and a prison where, he says in a voiceover, a thousand Palestinians are being held without trial; his comparative freedom of movement underscores the reality of apartheid. In full crisis, Y reconnects with Lea, a lost love from his youth (played by Naama Preis, Lapid’s wife), who used to do interpretation for international businessmen and has now been conscripted into propaganda work. (“I redeployed in hasbara,” she explains to Y, to which he replies: “Me too,” then parrots in English: “We’re right, we’re good, we suffer.”) She has been translating accounts of the most awful killings committed on October 7th and circulating them online. Seemingly adrift herself, she joins him as he traverses Israel from east to west—as he says, “from the sea of the dead to hell,” meaning Gaza. As they approach, they stop at a site called the Hill of Love, to which they’ve been directed by a soldier at a checkpoint. They’ve heard of the spot: Families come there to picnic while watching the bombs fall on Gaza. For Israelis, it seems genocide is a spectator sport.
While the film is, to put it lightly, almost entirely unsympathetic to Jewish Israelis, one moment stands out as an exception. As they approach the hill, Lea recites a litany of the cruelest acts of October 7th, in the pressured delivery usual to actors in Lapid’s films who are recounting something of great importance to them. This verbal tableau of violence—with Lea crying in sorrow and rage as she describes members of Hamas killing women, children, and the elderly—is the most impassioned moment of the film. A relatively brief scene, it nonetheless carries enormous emotional weight. To some it may even undercut the anti-Israel message of the film by giving voice to the Jewish Israeli narrative; Lea imagines rejoinders to critics abroad: “You live free from danger . . . You protest, you sign petitions . . . heroes! We know you feel no sadness for our dead . . . You can’t understand what it means to be Israeli.” And yet, after making space for the horrors themselves, Lapid turns his eye to the horrific way they’ve been metabolized. Y emerges from the car and climbs while repeating fragments of Lea’s litany to himself under his breath like a meditation; at the summit, his pain is alchemized into murderous resolve as he screams the words to the anthem he’s been commissioned to score, egging on the bombs as they fall on the people of Gaza.
That song, “The Anthem of the Victory Generation,” is not, in fact, a fictitious number written for the film. It is, rather, a real song, funded by real Israelis in November 2023, based on a real poem written by the Zionist poet Haim Gouri upon the state’s founding. (The film twice displays disclaimers about the song, noting that Gouri’s family did not approve either the poem’s appropriation or Lapid’s use of it in the film.) The words are truly chilling: “In one year / there will be nothing living there / And we’ll return to our homes. / In one year / We’ll annihilate them all.” After Y returns to Tel Aviv—and his wife and child—he finishes his commission and hears it performed at an event in Cyprus by a children’s chorus, their angelic voices sickeningly calling for genocide. Those who think that Lapid’s detestation of Israel—his insistence that it is a racist, murderous nation—is an exaggeration will have to answer for this song, the actual video of which is inserted into the film, with a performance by actual children. As he observed to me, “It’s hard to show in a more explicit way the obscenity of Israeli society.”
In the end, Lapid’s film of vicious assent—a negation of affirmation—offers no clearer path forward than his previous works, which are affirmations of negation that become negations of themselves. In those earlier works, the characters’ attempts to resist the reality of Israel and their connection to it—through radical political action, through education and literature, through exile, through cinema—are revealed to be futile. And Yes, too, concludes in a place of despair. For Lapid, it seems, there is no way out. So where does that leave us? As he remarked to me, “The good thing about being a filmmaker is that you don’t have to have an answer.”