‘Yes!’ is an incendiary exploration of Israel after October 7
Nadav Lapid’s satire about war, propaganda and bootlicking is the conflict like you've never seen it before.
There’s a term that’s entered the social media lexicon of late that’s continued to gain purchase: “Spiritually Israeli.” It pretty much means, “thing that isn’t Israeli, but is bad in a way that reminds me of Israel.”
The Forward, in an analysis last November, called it “a slur that isn’t really about Israel,” one that had been applied to everything from the Los Angeles Dodgers to Taylor Swift. During last week’s Knicks-Sixers NBA playoff series, the allegation was raised that Joel Embiid “plays Zionist hoops.”
“Spiritually Israeli” is not a term that I especially like, for a few reasons: It’s often brandished as an easy substitute for antisemitism. More than that, it’s lazy- it pretty much means, “thing I’ve decided I dislike, which doesn’t really have anything to do with Israel, but which I can nevertheless associate with an unrelated, hot-button political cause.”
I would imagine the vast majority of people who use the term “spiritually Israeli” have never been to Israel, and haven’t met an Israeli person. It’s part of an even more distasteful post-October 7 trend, in which people on either side of the conflict use Israel/Palestine either to establish social media clout or for ammo as part of celebrity fandom beefs.
Nadav Lapid, it’s clear, has much more substantive and heartfelt critiques of the state of Israel than such social media warriors do. The Tel Aviv-born filmmaker has assembled an acclaimed body of work that includes 2019’s Synonyms and 2021’s Ahed’s Knee, both of which were internationally acclaimed.
His new film, Yes! (Ken! in Hebrew), is my favorite that he’s made yet. A Cannes debut last year, it’s an incendiary film with a ton to say about Israel’s post-October 7 moment. You might not agree with his conclusions — and I don’t, entirely — but he’s made what’s probably my favorite film about the post-10/7 era, and one of the best of the year.
Yes!, after a brief theatrical rollout — more on that below — comes out on VOD channels on Tuesday. It is a satire, but it’s not a lecture, or smug, or self-righteous, as has been the case for so much Israel/Palestine commentary, across media, and across the spectrum. In fact, it’s often absurd and funny.
It’s nearly three hours long, but moves incredibly fast. The film has been compared by more than one critic to Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, another movie about a nation fearful and on the brink, and its elite spending that moment in seemingly endless bacchanalia.
The film begins with one such party, as we’re introduced to our protagonist Y (Ariel Bronz), and his wife Yasmin (Efrat Dor). He’s a pianist and composer, she’s a dancer, and in the post-October 7 era, they’ve been enlisted on behalf of the Israeli state and elite, to which they always say the titular “yes.” (The government’s go-between, it turns out, is a Russian immigrant played by Aleksei Serebryakov, who played the Russian oligarch father in Sean Baker’s Anora.)
The latest assignment, for Y, is to write a new, post-October 7 national anthem, with particularly bloodthirsty lyrics, such as “In one year there will be nothing left living there/And we’ll return safely to our homes/We’ll annihilate them all/And return to plow our fields.” (it is based, alas, on a real-life song.) This is a man who has chosen to become a bootlicker- at one point, literally, and is internally conflicted about his actions.
As I think I’ve made clear, this is a pretty scathing film about Israel and what it is today, one that comes right out and says that Israel is engaging in brutality and war crimes. The Israeli film industry and other artists in that country tend to be on the left side of the political spectrum, often harshly critical of the current government and of the turn Israeli politics and society have taken over the last 30 years or so. But Lapid, who was born, raised and educated in Israel but now lives in France, goes a bit further than most.
“On one hand I felt, strangely for me at least, a kind of empathy and tenderness because there was a feeling of agony, and there’s something tender about agony,” the director told the New York Times. “That didn’t last long, however. It was pretty quickly replaced by this — how would I call it? — this morbid vivacity.”
Israel’s culture minister, Miki Zohar, has objected to the film; a filmmaker at odds with a government culture minister was the exact subject of the filmmaker’s last movie, Ahed’s Knee.
If you subscribe to The Free Press or Tablet, this film is likely to cross many red lines, and it may not be for you. Although it’s worth noting that I haven’t seen any American critic or commentator who’s stridently pro-Israel so much as engage with the film, much less critique it.
But most of the usual rejoiners that you probably see every day on pro-Israel Facebook aren’t going to work here. The filmmaker is not, I don’t believe, an antisemite or self-hating Jew. He has not been brainwashed or indoctrinated by nefarious college professors. He’s not committing a “blood libel.” He’s not in the thrall of paymasters in Qatar or anywhere else.
“Sometimes I felt like the protagonist of a Jewish joke,” Lapid told the Hollywood Reporter. “The Jews call you an antisemite. And the antisemites call you a Jew.”
In fact, the “spiritually Israeli” insult notwithstanding, a lot of Lapid’s critique, about Israel losing itself in bacchanals and ever-present EDM music amid the current brutality, is a pretty unique and different one from most of what’s said about the conflict in the United States.
But all that said, Yes! is also a movie shot in Israel (as well as in Cyprus) by an Israeli director, with an almost entirely Israeli cast, that tells the story of Israel after October 7, almost entirely from an Israeli perspective. (While there’s a visit to the Gaza border, I don’t believe the film has any Palestinian characters with names or speaking lines.)
The film also received funding from the Israel Film Council and the Israel Film Fund, government bodies, and seven nominations from the Ophir Awards, Israel’s answer to the Oscars.
Therefore, the very existence of Yes! also crosses a number of red lines held by the BDS movement; Israel Film Council funding alone, after all, has caused films and film festivals to be boycotted in the United States. That letter earlier this year calling for a boycott of Israeli film institutions would certainly include Yes!, even though there’s a decent chance Nadav Lapid is even more hostile to the state of Israel than either Mark Ruffalo or Hannah Einbinder is.
Just this week, there was a public freakout over an author who merely included an Israeli character on one page of her novel.
Ahead of its VOD release this week, Yes! had a limited U.S. release in late March, with one-shot screenings or weeklong engagements in a handful of cities over the last two months. It did not open at all in my home market of Philadelphia.
It’s probably not Zionist enough to ever show in a Jewish or Israeli film festival in the U.S.; those Israeli Film Council logos likely mean it won’t ever be shown as part of any pro-Palestine film series either. This type of film is, however, the type of film-from-a-country-whose-government-dislikes-it that the Academy’s new International Film Oscar rules were meant to uplift.
When I talk about being on Team Show All the Films, Yes! Is the exact type of film I have in mind. This film may make you uncomfortable, and you should see it anyway.