Nadav Lapid crafts a stark, unsettling portrait of artistic compromise and the quiet violence of complicity.
To paraphrase the title of Nadav Lapid’s scathing satire: Yes, the Israeli director avoids the moral cesspool that ultimately swallows up the venal protagonist. The latter is a financially struggling jazz musician named Y. (Ariel Bronz). In the wake of the October 7 Hamas attacks, the broke Tel Aviv artist gets an offer seemingly too good to refuse. Avinoam, a bizarre PR agent whose face occasionally transforms into a video screen, asks him to compose a new national anthem for Israel. The effort is funded by a Russian billionaire (Aleksei Serebryakov) and would end Y’s financial worries while transforming him into a national – or rather: nationalist – icon.
Y has his ethical qualms, but these are promptly extinguished by the pecuniary prospects: No more of the vulgar cabaret acts he and his dancer wife Yasmine (Efrat Dor) perform for the Israeli elite to make ends meet. Both say “yes!” to the devilish deal which predictably becomes a moral slippery slope. Initially reluctant, Y. quickly submits to the seductive choreography of power. With each symbolic gesture – dyeing his hair blond, costuming himself in ever more flamboyant theatrical garb – he stages his own ideological capitulation. The national anthem he composes emerges as an operatic manifesto of exclusion, imbued with fascistic aesthetics and jingoistic language.
Throughout, iPhone alerts and harrowing sound design – screams, explosions, news announcements – puncture the bizarre degradation of their lives. These violent disruptions remind viewers of the war-ravaged reality looming just beyond the city’s bubble. The visuals cut with surgical irony. Stark, over-lit spaces pulse with theatrical artifice, stripping scenes of naturalism. Characters lurch through rigid tableaux, choreographed like state-sanctioned puppets in airless and antiseptic settings. Colors clash or vanish, reflecting a world where repetition and performance erode meaning. The aesthetic is not decoration but an overemphasized indictment: a cinematic world that exposes its own manipulation to mirror the very same process.
Lapid dissects Y.’s transformation with self-serving smugness. This palpable awareness of his own moral superiority somewhat undermines the ideological critique of art as a mouthpiece of state violence. Instead of confronting the numbing pressure of economic hardship, Lapid ridicules it. Poverty seems almost absurdist. The protagonist’s choice between precarious autonomy and corrupted complicity is simplified as one between excess, both politically and personally, and slight discomfort. The lack of any existential threat robs Y of psychological ambivalence, and his highly symbolic dilemma of ethical nuances. Attempts to add historical complexity by confronting the collective trauma haunting the Israeli psyche come off as rather heavy-handed.
Lapid’s strength lies clearly in exposing the grotesque extremes of propaganda, and highlighting how state-sanctioned violence can creep into the very fabric of culture. His furious allegory boasts theatrical excess. Unfolding in three acts, Yes! charts both the protagonist Y.’s collapse and the moral unraveling of a nation enthralled by its own ideology. The film’s title becomes a grim chorus. Each affirmation marks the erosion of conscience, the seduction of ease over ethics. In its best moments, it lashes out at the hypocrisies of power and interrogates the artistic urge to surrender principle for visibility and trade critique for access.
- OT: Ken
- Director: Nadav Lapid
- Year: 2025
