The movie is called \u201cYes\u201d but it\u2019s not the kind of yes that comes after someone offers you another cupcake. Nor is it the so-bad-it\u2019s-good acquiescence to a guilty pleasure (or a guilty pain). What Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid is out to evoke is bone-deep submission: the kind of total capitulation and surrender that makes a person unrecognizable even to themselves. Of course, his film is a comedy, the darkest one in a while.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not long into the running time that we get to know wiry, bearded Y (Ariel Bronz, impressively tamping down a jangle of nerves), who offers us his philosophy in a half-mutter. Pedaling down the beach during a pink-hued Tel Aviv dusk, he tells his infant son in the baby seat to give up. \u201cGive up to the sea,\u201d he says, and to all the good things: T-shirts in winter, a stranger\u2019s smile. \u201cAs early as possible,\u201d he insists. He knows no other way to beat down the constant text alerts of attacks that are breaking his brain.<\/p>\n
Seeing Y, a pianist and songwriter, and his wife, a hip-hop instructor named Yasmin (Efrat Dor), in their domestic bliss \u2014 they\u2019re parents of a child who, in one of Lapid\u2019s wicked flourishes, was born Oct. 8, 2023 \u2014 is already something of a shocker. If you can imagine the strutting Nicolas Cage and lithe Laura Dern of David Lynch\u2019s \u201cWild at Heart\u201d<\/a> but with an apartment and a kid, that\u2019s them. Normally, they\u2019re out livening up parties thrown by Israel\u2019s ruling class. They rip off their clothes, dunk their heads in the dip and lead dance battles to La Bouche\u2019s \u201cBe My Lover.\u201d<\/p>\n Sometimes they relieve the babysitter in a crashed-out haze. Other nights, they let the wealthy take them home. (\u201cYes\u201d is a film that brings newfound explicitness to both ear-tonguing and bootlicking.) Director Paolo Sorrentino\u2019s majestically decadent 2013 film \u201cThe Great Beauty\u201d<\/a> kicked off in a similar vein of hedonism and while a belated sense of conscience is often the trajectory of stories like this, rarer is the plot that plunges us even further into the void \u2014 deeper into yes.<\/p>\n Lapid is not especially well-liked in his homeland. (He lives in Paris.) When his camera isn\u2019t woozily circling like a merry-go-round, his edginess glints. He has turned the subject of being Israeli into a career-long preoccupation, approached with a sense of queasiness. Earlier movies \u2014 especially 2019\u2019s \u201cSynonyms\u201d<\/a> \u2014 were about characters trapped in cultural expectations.<\/p>\n Confidently, \u201cYes\u201d ups the buffoonery in a big way, signaling an increased willingness to bruise viewers. Dwarfed by giant Israeli flags and pinned in a constant state of hypernationalist pride, Lapid\u2019s characters are satiric creations: brutish IDF generals, a louche Russian billionaire on a yacht (Aleksey Serebryakov of \u201cAnora\u201d<\/a>) and Trump-tanned mouthpieces with surreal phone screens for heads. As they sneak bites of steak under the table, Y and Yasmin know their non-careers are doomed to end. So when a lucrative commission comes to Y, inviting him to compose a patriotic anthem for the \u201cvictory generation,\u201d you already know what his answer is.<\/p>\n It\u2019s almost a magic trick that, after his delirious first hour, Lapid has an entirely different emotional register in store. Grappling with his shame at taking the assignment or just pretending to (it\u2019s unclear), Y dyes his hair blond and does one of those artistic drives into the desert, ending up at the Dead Sea. He listens to Bach on headphones and broods. Nothing comes out.<\/p>\n But mainly he hopes to reconnect with Leah (Naama Preis), a no-nonsense friend from his past that you quickly realize is more than just an old flame but a conduit to a lost innocence that they both seem in need of rekindling. She\u2019s become a propagandist for Israel but to watch them maneuver around the keys of a restaurant\u2019s piano which they commandeer to the delight of the diners, you can tell their physical attraction remains.<\/p>\n They drive and seethe, Leah uncorking a devastating monologue about the Hamas-committed horrors she has witnessed, and \u201cYes\u201d becomes a desperate confessional, the dusty road paradoxically taking them closer to the violence but somehow further away from understanding their own pain. Over a hill, Gaza can be seen burning, dark smoke rising as fighter jets pass.<\/p>\n These are tough sights to put in a film, tougher still to thread them to a notion of personal compromise. \u201cYes\u201d won\u2019t sway any hardliners but it should convince anyone with eyes of the absurdity of trying to write a hate song, even as Y screams its vicious lyrics into the wind. Lapid gets a touch too biblical during his middle section (hold that rock storm raining down on the guilt-ridden) but he\u2019s made something that grinds at his unease.<\/p>\n The movie\u2019s look is well-coordinated, Sha\u00ef Goldman\u2019s cinematography riding the line between colorful mania \u2014 cartoonish to shrewd effect \u2014 and the kind of realism that would somehow include a live duck, perched on Y\u2019s shoulder in one scene and hanging on for dear life as coked-up revelers pass. Later on, there\u2019s a significant tangent into grainy video, a music performance that deserves to be left a surprise. (Suffice to say, \u201cYes\u201d isn\u2019t a wholly invented story.)<\/p>\n