The Israeli Anti-Israel Movie I Can't Shake

What is YES!, the new film from Paris-based Israeli director Nadav Lapid? Is it a Trojan horse using Israel Film Fund money to bite the hand that feeds it, or just controlled opposition? Is it a radical statement from a director rejecting his homeland’s actions, or a fruitless exercise in self-loathing? The answer to all of this is in the title. After talking with leftist friends about this, I was faced with another question: Can I, in good conscience, recommend a movie like this when projects like No Other Land and anthology From Ground Zero actually focus on the underrepresented Palestinian perspective? I don’t know, even for a movie that wrestles with Israel this vigorously. But if you do want to see an Israeli director go against the grain, look no further than this movie.

After his last film Ahed’s Knee shared the Jury Prize at Cannes with Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, Lapid got to work on a new satirical script. He got the Israel Film Fund on board in early 2023, and even considered shooting the film in America with Joaquin Phoenix as the lead. After October 7 and Israel’s subsequent attacks on the Gaza strip, Lapid went back to his birthplace, rewriting his movie without the Film Fund’s approval, as he tells it. The result is a grief-stricken 2 ½ hour clusterfuck I haven’t been able to shake since seeing it last week. (It’s out May 12 on PVOD.)

The basic premise, which starts an hour in: Jazz pianist Y (Ariel Bronz) is tasked with making a new national anthem for a post-October 7 Israel. As Y writes the song, his wife Yasmin (Efrat Dor) expresses his doubts, but decides the money from a Russian oligarch (Aleksei Serebryakov) is more important than his morals. As his ethics deteriorate, he reconnects with Leah (Naama Preis), an old ex now working for the IDF, and the two embark on a journey to the Gaza strip.

There is so much going on in this movie that seeing other reviews felt weirdly grounding: yes, the protagonist Y did slip on a banana peel on the way to Gaza; yes, there was a dance-off where IDF soldiers march to Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender” over La Bouche’s eurodance hit “Be My Lover”. With all the surreal touches – Y’s baby is abruptly swapped out with a dummy for a single sight gag, a building instantly rises hundreds of feet in the air — the movie frequently feels like the most intense live-action cartoon of all time. The cinematography, from Shaï Goldman, leans into the chaos: sometimes whip-panning like a slick Edgar Wright movie, sometimes spinning until everything loses definition, always moving somewhere. In its focus on the perpetrators rather than the victims, I’ve seen comparisons to Zone of Interest: where that film was eerily still, this is a film terrified of stopping to think.

When the film actually slows down in the second half, the guilt and anger finally surface. As Y visits the Golani hill, Lapid and Goldman let these (unauthorized) images and performances speak for themselves. In what’s almost certainly the most polarizing scene, Y’s IDF PR ex Leah recites the events of October 7, and Y repeats them as he walks within 500 meters of an actual war zone, eventually screaming his own lyrics into the void. The song, as the opening and closing credits tell us, is a real parody of a famous Israeli poem by Haim Gouri, commissioned by public-relations provocateur Ofer Rosenbaum to include lines like “we will annihilate everyone.” In a movie where everything is fake - the piano playing obviously dubbed, the visual effects deliberately kitsch - its most outlandish element is 100% real.

Lapid reiterates in interviews that this is just as much about the American mindset as it is the Israeli one, and of course, those histories are intertwined. If you grew up going to synagogue, you might have thought supporting Israel was the liberal position; that’s what is taught in Hebrew schools. As a teen, I would do yearly trips with my synagogue to Washington DC, and advocating for Israel was an option alongside gun control and LGBTQ rights. As Israel launches horrific strikes in Lebanon, in an operation nicknamed Eternal Darkness, it's less and less possible to justify that framework. By YES!, nobody is under any pretenses they’re the good guys – everyone either has a vested interest in harm or they’re too eager to turn a blind eye. Y's wife Yasmin still wants to believe she's good, though she, too, ultimately resorts to violence on occasion.

It’s hard to unlearn things that once seemed so fundamentally true, and even Lapid’s said in interviews he still has love for his homeland. That love does not mean the perpetrators deserve forgiveness, nor the loyalty they crave, and it just makes the cognitive dissonance more relentless. As a rare outspoken Israeli figure, Lapid makes his guilt deafening — literally, with a chaotic sound mix that gets louder than some blockbusters and reaches Robert Altman levels of density at parts. YES! doesn’t feature a single Palestinian character, and Lapid has even said he isn't the guy to thoughtfully depict that experience. In that sense, the movie is better for focusing purely on the the perpetrators, but whether that justifies the approach is up to you. 

At least some feathers were rustled in the movie’s current form: when both YES! and Shai Carmeli-Pollak’s Palestinian-focused The Sea won at Israel’s Ophir Awards, current Minister of Culture Miki Zohar threatened to pull funding. That doesn’t change how support for Israel - at least its Prime Minister -  is decreasing even among Jewish people. For every censored “Free Palestine”, there are thousands of cheers in the audience. And Lapid is aware, too, of how accepted his view is becoming: while speaking to Y, IDF PR manager Avinoam (Sharon Alexander) comments “even the audience hates Israel”. He then turns right to the camera and says “every one of you has a secret that would get you killed… we have a war; what have you got?”

In the documentary Israelism, Middle East Peace president Lara Friedman warns “Support for Israel, today, is replacing what it means to be a Jew”, and that’s the sadness at the core of this movie: whatever intentions there were of preserving one people are now subsumed under attacking another. A movie like this can’t change much about a genocide, and Lapid likely knew that going in. What’s done is done, and will have a Leonardo DiCaprio-financed hotel over it soon enough. Lapid himself is looking past Israel for his next entry, and half-joked about shooting an Arizona Western to Cultured Magazine. Maybe YES! ultimately amounts to nothing, but unlike its characters, it's trying to move beyond that.

Thank you for reading. This is very different from my usual writing, and definitely riskier, but I decided it was worth it. I might make this a recurring series, as I also have an essay about Charlie Polinger's The Plague in the works, but I wanted to get this out of my system first. I’ll repost this in May when the film hits streaming.