You can hear the rage behind the laughter in the Israeli satire “Yes,” and you can hear the despair in its lamentation. Set in the wake of Oct. 7, 2023, when the Palestinian militant group Hamas led a deadly assault in southern Israel, the movie is an unsparing, at times uncomfortable existential howl. In many ways, it seems to be familiar territory for the Israeli writer-director Nadav Lapid, whose movies restlessly circle around questions of art and identity, nation and alienation. With their attention to film form and storytelling provocations, Lapid’s movies are easy to admire; this one, though, isn’t interested in our love.
Every work of art is autobiographical and “Yes” is at once both a portrait of a country and of artists in times of war. This personal approach is in keeping with Lapid’s previous features, each of which grapple with personal and national identity — as an artist, an Israeli and as an expat (he lives in France) — with degrees of analytic cool and narrative experimentation. Lapid drew on his military service for “Policeman” (2014), his feature directing debut about a dead-ending clash between far-right and far-left factions. His childhood tenure as a precocious poet inspired his drama, “The Kindergarten Teacher” (2015), about a woman who becomes obsessed with a child whom she comes to see as a flickering light in a bleak, dark world.
There’s no savior in “Yes,” which centers on Y (Ariel Bronz, a live wire), who lives with his wife, Jasmine (a sympathetic Efrat Dor), in a bright apartment and spends a lot of energy pleasing other people. He’s a pianist and she’s a dancer, and they’re passionate about each other, their infant son and their shared desire for success. They’re ferociously ambitious, and have set their minds on improving their lives no matter what. To that end, Y and Jasmine ingratiate themselves — with hungry smiles, open arms and gyrating hips — with the country’s power elite, including with leaders from the military, government and industry. They don’t only sing for their supper, though; they also effectively bark.
By the time that Y is on a yacht for a party to celebrate Independence Day, Lapid has established the scathing tone and accelerated rhythms of the movie’s first half. Calling himself a comic, Y arrives with a live duck on his shoulder, an accessory whose symbolism is as loud as klaxon horns. There, he meets Avinoam (Sharon Alexander), a braggart with a bad blond dye job and a face that looks like it’s been dusted with Cheetos. Avinoam runs “the general staff PR” and damns some news organizations as antisemitic. “Even the audience hates Israel,” Avinoam says before looking right at the camera, a startling moment that pierces the fourth wall and demolishes the divide between the worlds onscreen and off.
This exchange exemplifies the confrontational approach that Lapid takes throughout “Yes” while underscoring Y’s obsequiousness. Y doesn’t question anything said by Avinoam, including how he frames antisemitism and criticism of Israel as interchangeable. Y instead focuses on himself (“I wanted to be the greatest, meanest pianist in Jewish history”), bangs out a song on a piano — cut to the duck seemingly croaking “Long live the State of Israel!” — and keeps smiling and networking. By the time that the party has reached its climax, the dance music is thumping, the revelers are thrashing and Y is on all fours, tongue-wagging.
Lapid throws out so much so quickly — gargoyle faces, surrealistic flourishes, spasms of comedy, shocks of horror — that it creates an air of unrelenting instability. At one point on the yacht, Avinoam’s entire head turns into a screen that plays what seem to be (non-graphic) images from Oct. 7. He demands that Y watch but the pianist doesn’t want to, looking unhappy as he mentions atrocities. Lapid punctuates Y’s uncharacteristic refusal with a long shot of the yacht and the horrific sounds of screaming. After a few quiet moments, Lapid cuts back to the boat, a vantage point that, Avinoam says, allows you to watch the bombing of Beirut.
In “Yes,” smiles are answered by screams and screams are answered by yet more smiles, and on and on it goes. This grim cycle seems set to continue after Y receives a commission to write a patriotic anthem. He receives the offer from a thuggish, mysterious Russian, a powerful player called the Big Billionaire (Aleksey Serebryakov). The billionaire is a grotesque who Lapid, in a signature dynamic move, puts into play with another character, Y’s former lover, Leah (Naama Preis). As human as the billionaire is cartoonish, Leah ends up driving with Y to the front, where they watch dark smoke rise over Gaza and this movie quiets down enough to make it clear — if it isn’t already — that it’s been a tragedy from the start.
It’s important to note that Lapid doesn’t include major Palestinian or Arab characters in his movies, an absence that has shaped his feature-length films, this one included. Again and again, Lapid has turned his pitiless, diagnostic gaze on Israel and Israelis and, again and again, he finds fault, sometimes with humor and often in anger. “Yes” is an unsparing movie and can be hard to watch partly because Lapid’s raw fury and maximalist approach can border on off-putting excess. There are times in “Yes” when he seems to be veering out of control. At other times, he almost seems to bait you to look away, to turn off and tune out just like his revelers, even as he inexorably pulls you in, forcing you to bear witness alongside him.
Yes Not rated. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. In theaters.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
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