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Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Yes' Review: Nadav Lapid's Blistering Attack on Israeli Nationalism is an Effectively Blunt Instrument
No one was expecting Nadav Lapid to hold back in his first feature since the events of October 7, 2023: The Israeli filmmaker has long been cinema's most vigorously expressive and outspoken critic of government policy in his birth country, with films like 2019's 'Synonyms' and 2021's 'Ahed's Knee' bristling with fury and shame over Israel's national military culture and artistic censorship. Even with those expectations firmly in place, however, Lapid's new film 'Yes' startles with the sheer, spitting intensity of its rage against the state, projected onto its amoral blank-slate protagonist: a self-abasing musician commissioned to compose a rousing new national anthem, explicitly celebrating the demolition of Palestine. A whirling, maximalist satire at once despairing and exuberant, subtle as a cannonball in its evisceration of the ruling classes and those who obey them, it's both absurdist comedy and serious-as-cancer polemic: as grave as any film with an extended dance break to 2000s novelty hit 'The Ketchup Song' can possibly be. Following 'Ahed's Knee,' which played in competition at Cannes and won the jury prize, the placement of this huge, heaving work outside the festival's official selection — it premiered instead at the tail-end of the Directors' Fortnight sidebar — has raised eyebrows. It's hard not to suspect some level of programming timidity around a film this fragrantly provocative and topically hot, which will likely continue outside the festival sphere. Many arthouse distributors will say no to 'Yes,' a film sure to remain divisive even among audiences who share its politics, given its brash, antic eccentricity of tone and style. But this is not cinema made with the intent of being embraced or awarded by any faction: It's exhilaratingly of the moment and in the moment, a filmmaker's immediate, unfiltered response to atrocities too urgent to be addressed with tact or good taste. More from Variety Chilean AIDS Drama 'The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo' Wins Un Certain Regard Award at Cannes Josh O'Connor Art Heist Film 'The Mastermind' Steals 5.5-Minute Cannes Ovation as Director Kelly Reichardt Says 'America Is in a Ditch Right Now' 'Young Mothers' Review: Belgium's Dardenne Brothers Adopt a Wider Focus for Their Most Humane Drama in More Than a Decade Played in ping-ponging modes of morose containment and deranged vitality by a superb Ariel Bronz, our hardly-hero is Y (the same cryptic name, though not the same character, as the protagonist in 'Ahed's Knee'), a pianist and performer introduced in the middle of a frantically choreographed Eurodance production number that sees him variously fellating a baguette, dunking his head into a punch bowl, bobbing for cherry tomatoes in a swimming pool, and extravagantly making out with dance partner Yasmine (Efrat Dor). Turns out she's also his wife, and together they make a living performing this kind of unhinged floor show at private parties for baying Tel Aviv elites. Whether an ensuing dance battle with a horde of Israeli military leaders is officially part of the routine or not, it seems to regularly happen anyway, with Yasmine quietly begging her husband to let them win — before they supplement the night's earnings with some three-way sex work for a frisky elderly client in a cavernous mansion with the taxidermied heads of her relatives mounted on the walls. Welcome to 'The Good Life,' as the film's first chapter is ruefully titled — good for whom, you might ask, though you hardly need to. By day, Y and Yasmine live in a modest city apartment with their baby son, further working as a musician and hip-hop dance instructor respectively. These are hard times for artists, and you take what gigs you can to get by: The title 'Yes' is seemingly a reference to the word that Y, in particular, simply cannot not say, at whatever cost to his integrity and sanity. A particularly hefty offer that he can't — but really, really should — refuse rolls in from a Russian oligarch (Aleksei Serebryakov, most recently seen to similarly shuddery effect in 'Anora') in bed with the Israeli authorities, who commissions Y to compose the music to a sort of hymn to the post-October 7 era. No standard compilation of patriotic platitudes, the lyrics Y is given to work with amount to barbaric bragging over the sheer scale of carnage the Israeli army has wrought on Gaza in the last 18 months: '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.' Lapid trades in indelicate satire for indelicate times — Y at one point literally and lavishly licks his wealthy benefactor's gleaming knee-high boots — so these grisly verses at first seem a typically blunt caricature of Israeli nationalism at its most ruthless. But the great, gasp-inducing twist is that these lyrics are not a product of the director's imagination, but taken from a real-world composition by the anti-Palestinian activist group Civic Front. Also real is a climactic music video in which the song is trilled by a choir of cherubic, white-robed children, their faces altered by AI — it might not be state-produced propaganda, but it is indicative of a vicious political climate hard to parody in its excess and extremity. After the drunken, dizzying madness of the first act, the second — titled 'The Path' — arrives as a harsher hangover, as Y, after bleaching his hair and donning unseasonal velvet and snakeskin boots, takes a solo trek into the desert to work on the song. For morbid inspiration, he approaches the Palestinian border, signaled by a grimly hovering duvet of black smoke, and is joined by ex-girlfriend Lea (Naama Preis), an IDF employee who regales him with an exhaustive, vituperative litany of Hamas' crimes against Israel — her own way of rationalizing the panorama of destruction laid out before them. Y, doing his best to maintain apolitical blinkers on both sides, isn't convinced; meanwhile, he has the increasingly repulsed Yasmine and the chiding anti-Zionist voice of his late mother prompting him to wonder if he's said one yes too many. A third act, 'The Night,' sees these conflicting impulses and responsibilities finally come to a head: Y himself may not decide on a clear course of action, but 'Yes' makes brazenly clear its own conviction that silent neutrality is not conscionable or sustainable while the last of Gaza burns. Some may find Lapid's film a hectoring and repetitive statement, but it sets out to be one: Constructed with typical dynamism from the director but hardly as lyrical as 'Synonyms' or as intellectually knotty as 'Ahed's Knee,' this is rhetorical cinema that brooks no possibility of being misheard or misinterpreted. Rather, Lapid encourages all on his side to be at least as loud and strident in protest, to have any chance of being heard over the ongoing din of war. Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week Emmy Predictions: Talk/Scripted Variety Series - The Variety Categories Are Still a Mess; Netflix, Dropout, and 'Hot Ones' Stir Up Buzz Oscars Predictions 2026: 'Sinners' Becomes Early Contender Ahead of Cannes Film Festival
Daily Express
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Express
Israeli director decries ‘blindness' over Gaza
Published on: Saturday, May 24, 2025 Published on: Sat, May 24, 2025 By: AFP Text Size: Director Nadav Lapid CANNES: Director Nadav Lapid said his new film 'Yes' about a musician asked to re-write the Israeli national anthem is a response to his country's 'blindness' to suffering in Gaza. Lapid has previously dissected his country's ills in 'Synonyms', which won the Golden Bear in Berlin in 2019, and 'Ahed's Knee' (2021). In 'Yes', he portrays a society buried under its own 'dark side' since Palestinian militants Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023. 'Blindness in Israel is unfortunately a fairly collective illness,' the 50-year-old director told AFP at the Cannes festival where 'Yes' premiered on Thursday. Over nearly two and a half hours, it follows a musician named Y, who is commissioned by the authorities to rewrite the Israeli national anthem into a propaganda piece calling for the eradication of Palestinians. 'What happened on October 7, the level of horror and cruelty, pushed everything to a biblical scale,' he said. Advertisement 'The great Israeli fantasy... of waking up one day to find the Palestinians gone has become a political programme.' He added that 'very few people are standing up to say that what is happening in Gaza is unbearable' and that there is 'a kind of consensus about the superiority of Israeli lives over Palestinian lives'. In one scene, Y and his wife (Shai Goldman) continue feeding their baby while glancing indifferently at their phones, which display notifications of new deadly airstrikes in Gaza. In another, a small crowd gathers on a rooftop to dance joyfully to the sound of fighter jets overhead. On the eve of the Cannes festival, Lapid was among more than 380 film figures, including major Hollywood actors, to sign an open letter condemning the film industry's silence on what it called 'genocide' in Gaza. Lapid said he had to overcome numerous obstacles before starting the film, which was carried out in 'guerrilla mode' as the Israeli offensive in Gaza was under way. Technicians and actors pulled out, and some backers chose not to get involved. 'I was told people no longer make political films on these subjects. They no longer want films for or against' the war, said the director. 'Yes' also refers to the only answer artists are allowed to give in Israel when asked about their support for the war, according to lead actor Ariel Bronz. 'Our first duty as artists is not to go where the wind is blowing,' said Bronz, who caused uproar in 2016 by inserting an Israeli flag into his anus during a performance in Tel Aviv. 'We need to pay a personal price and it's a real struggle to survive in this position where you're totally isolated in your own country,' he told AFP. French producers backed the film and there was also support from an independent Israeli public fund despite its biting tone. 'Yes' will open in European cinemas in September, but no Israeli distributor has so far agreed to screen it. 'If I didn't have inside me the ambition, the hope, the pride and the fantasy to shake things up, I wouldn't have made it,' Lapid added. 'I think society needs a shock, and I hope this film will be one.' The Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 left 1,218 people dead on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures. A further 251 people were taken hostage. Israel's retaliatory campaign has killed at least 53,762 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory, whose figures are considered reliable by the United Nations. * Follow us on our official WhatsApp channel and Telegram for breaking news alerts and key updates! * Do you have access to the Daily Express e-paper and online exclusive news? Check out subscription plans available. Stay up-to-date by following Daily Express's Telegram channel. Daily Express Malaysia
Hindustan Times
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid at Cannes: 'I understood this time the vengeance would be biblical'
Somewhere in the middle of Israeli director Nadav Lapid's new feature film, Yes, is a joke about a Jew talking to a travel agent about a suitable destination for his vacation. The Jew scours a globe given to him, but is still unable to point to a place. "Do you have another globe?" he finally asks. Yes, which had its world premiere in the Directors' Fortnight parallel programme at the 78th Cannes Film Festival (May 13-24), reflects the Paris-based Lapid's determination to not seek a safe choice of filmmaking in a dangerous world. Lapid, whose previous works that are often critical of the Israeli government include Ahed's Knee, which won the Jury Prize in Cannes four years ago, questions the unrelenting bombing of Gaza and aberrant vengeance, in his movie shot in the middle of the war. The story of Y, a struggling jazz musician entrusted with the responsibility of setting a new national anthem of Israel to music, and his wife Jasmine, a dancer, the two-and-half-hour film ran into trouble even before it began the production when several Israeli actors and technicians refused to work on a project critical of the war on Gaza. Lapid and his cast and crew went to within 500 metres of Israel's border with Gaza, where, as the director says you hear "endless explosions" and see "smoke rising in the horizon". The chairman of the competition jury at the International Film Festival of India, Goa in 2022, Lapid talks to The Hindustan Times about the making of the movie about a war that has killed more than 53,000 people in Gaza after the Hamas invasion of Israel on October 7 killed 1,200 people and led to 250 people being taken hostage. When I was in Goa I think I was already working on the new film. It began as a kind of reflection about the place of artists, the weak place of artists, the defeated place of artists, the relationship between artists and the power, artists and the money, The modern artist is a clown and a prostitute, someone who is obliged to in a way and doesn't really have the capacity of saying, No. In order to have a normal life, he is obliged to be submissive. I live in Paris. When I got to Israel a few days after October 7, I found myself, you know, inside of a kind of two opposite feelings. On the one end, I felt a tenderness and even compassion towards my motherland that I didn't feel for so many years. You saw that the people were traumatised. They were in mourning. There was something heartbreaking in it at the same time. I understood again that this mourning, this silent shock, is going to bring about the worst results possible. And that this time, the vengeance would be biblical. For me it was clear they are going to create an image that will be stained in the collective memory for hundreds of years. There is a certain moment in life where normality is not an option anymore. There is not any more place for purity. There is no more place for normality. Israelis have had for years this fantasy about not having a Palestine anymore, getting rid of the Palestinians. This crazy, insane fantasy that one can dream, it suddenly became a concrete strategical programme. So, you know, I think the level of hatred is so huge, it is really a bitter, endless hatred. It's a war film, it's a love film, it's a musical, it's an almost fantasy film. I mean in a way the question in the film is, can something exist outside of the war? The film begins at a certain point and gets closer and closer to the world. It is a war film, but it wants to be a lot of other things, a little bit like its protagonists, a jazz musician and a dancer. They want to dance, they want to think, they want to love, they want to eat, they want to be normal parents. And at the end, you know, nothing will. I mean, the war will swallow them. The filmmaking was hard, but the daily news is worse. When you read the news about the war, it's worse. There is a moment in the film when the lead character is telling his partner a joke. Do you have a different globe? Is this the globe in which we live? I truly don't understand what other kinds of films we are supposed to do. I mean, I don't understand what it means to make safe films in a dangerous world. But it's almost a form of collation. Trump is there a bit in the film. He looks a little bit like a young Trump, you know, very tanned and very blown. But I am not a politician. I always feel for me it's kind of a mistake in attributing such things to political circumstances, in a way the elections. I think that there is a kind of sickness in the heart and soul of a society. Some societies get sick. It's very, very complicated for them to cure themselves. And I think the Israeli society is deeply sick and it doesn't help that all the people who call themselves Friends of Israel, they try to, I mean, they think that they help the society by preserving and legitimising its sickness instead of making it face the truth. I think this blighting, this blindness towards the other, this feeling of eternal victim, this is what creates (Benjamin) Netanyahu, the one who created or is creating this. I don't care about Netanyahu. I care about the people, the people that I don't know, and of course, the people I know. And they seem to be taken by the same blindness. It breaks my heart. Being an antisemitic is being an idiot. And being opposed to Israeli politics is the only normal thing that you can do at this moment. So I think if we can distinguish between normality and stupidity, we can distinguish between antisemitism and being human today. If you're a human today, you cannot agree with this anti-humane politics.
Al Arabiya
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Al Arabiya
Israeli director Nadav Lapid decries ‘blindness' over Gaza
Director Nadav Lapid said his new film Yes, about a musician asked to rewrite the Israeli national anthem, is a response to his country's 'blindness' to suffering in Gaza. Lapid has previously dissected his country's ills in Synonyms, which won the Golden Bear in Berlin in 2019, and Ahed's Knee (2021). In Yes, he portrays a society buried under its own 'dark side' since Palestinian militants Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023. 'Blindness in Israel is unfortunately a fairly collective illness,' the 50-year-old director told AFP at the Cannes festival, where Yes premiered on Thursday. Over nearly two and a half hours, it follows a musician named Y, who is commissioned by the authorities to rewrite the Israeli national anthem into a propaganda piece calling for the eradication of Palestinians. 'What happened on October 7, the level of horror and cruelty, pushed everything to a biblical scale,' he said. 'The great Israeli fantasy… of waking up one day to find the Palestinians gone has become a political program.' He added that 'very few people are standing up to say that what is happening in Gaza is unbearable' and that there is 'a kind of consensus about the superiority of Israeli lives over Palestinian lives.' In one scene, Y and his wife (Shai Goldman) continue feeding their baby while glancing indifferently at their phones, which display notifications of new deadly airstrikes in Gaza. In another, a small crowd gathers on a rooftop to dance joyfully to the sound of fighter jets overhead. On the eve of the Cannes festival, Lapid was among more than 380 film figures, including major Hollywood actors, to sign an open letter condemning the film industry's silence on what it called 'genocide' in Gaza. Lapid said he had to overcome numerous obstacles before starting the film, which was carried out in 'guerrilla mode' as the Israeli offensive in Gaza was under way. Technicians and actors pulled out, and some backers chose not to get involved. 'I was told people no longer make political films on these subjects. They no longer want films for or against' the war, said the director. Yes also refers to the only answer artists are allowed to give in Israel when asked about their support for the war, according to lead actor Ariel Bronz. 'Our first duty as artists is not to go where the wind is blowing,' said Bronz, who caused uproar in 2016 by inserting an Israeli flag into his anus during a performance in Tel Aviv. 'We need to pay a personal price and it's a real struggle to survive in this position where you're totally isolated in your own country,' he told AFP. French producers backed the film, and there was also support from an independent Israeli public fund despite its biting tone. Yes will open in European cinemas in September, but no Israeli distributor has so far agreed to screen it. 'If I didn't have inside me the ambition, the hope, the pride, and the fantasy to shake things up, I wouldn't have made it,' Lapid added. 'I think society needs a shock, and I hope this film will be one.' The Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, left 1,218 people dead on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures. A further 251 people were taken hostage. Israel's retaliatory campaign has killed at least 53,762 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory, whose figures are considered reliable by the United Nations.
The Guardian
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Yes review – a fierce satire of Israel's ruling classes, radioactive with political pain
Nadav Lapid's Yes is a fierce, stylised, confrontational caricature-satire that invites a comparison with George Grosz, dialled up to 11 in its sexualised choreography and almost radioactive with political pain. With icy provocation, Israel's ruling classes are presented as decadent and indifferent to the slaughter and suffering of Gaza. But the film is also in some ways a sympathetic study of a people haunted by the antisemitic butchery of 7 October. It is inspired by the activist group Civic Front, which after 7 October released a new version of Haim Gouri's classic song Hareut, or Fellowship, with jarring new lyrics calling for wholesale extermination in Gaza. A fictional version of this song features here, with lyrics about attacking the bearers of the swastika (as in the original) but also presents its audience with slick equivalence: the 'Nazi' gotcha-comparison is levelled at Israel in a way that it isn't at other countries. There is an odious Russian fintech bro here, commissioning jingoistic, nationalistic music; the suggested equivalence between Putin and Israel is presented without subtlety, although subtlety is maybe beside the point. One fourth-wall breaking scene has one man list the people who are supposedly anti-Israel: the BBC, CNN, the New York Times – and then turn furiously and directly to the camera: '… and you too are anti-Israel!' Y (Ariel Bronz) is a musician and composer married to Yasmin (Efrat Dor) whose family's money and connections promise a comfortable future for them both and their year-old baby in Tel Aviv. They are enjoying an almost frantic high life of partying, booze and drugs, amid people who want to affirm their reality, to show the world and each other that they are not to be cowed by terrorism and by those who want what they wanted before 7 October – an end to the state of Israel. But Y is traumatised by the recent death of his mother and the reality of the family's cramped conditions in a tiny flat. He composes a new, aggressively anti-Gaza song, apparently with the patronage of a wealthy Russian (played by Aleksei Serebyakov) and, brought to the edge of some profound emotional breakdown by the strain of processing the agony of 7 October and – perhaps – by the suspicion that the response is futile vengeance, Y abandons his family and heads off to reconnect with his old lover Leah (Naama Preis). Leah, a translator with access to restricted official documents, can give him the authentic details about the 7 October atrocity – details that Y simultaneously fears and demands. And he is seized with a desire to scream his poem, cruelly or cathartically, from Golani Hill, otherwise known as the Hill of Love, which overlooks Gaza City itself. As before with Lapid, there are brilliant, showy set-pieces: the opening party scene is a marvel of extremity and nightmarish jaded sensuality. The point is evidently to suggest their heartlessness and solipsism – although this approach is not as powerful as the more plausibly real scenes showing Y with Leah. As one character says: 'You are devastated by what it is to live in Gaza, but you don't know what it is to be Israeli.' It is a paradox within which this film lives. Yes screened at the Cannes film festival.
