Yes: It's We Who Write This History

Few films open with the kind of potent verve that Yes has, beginning in media res during a house party with thumping dance music and some of the most abrasive, eye-searing lighting to be found this side of a Gaspar Noé film. An almost fetishistic level of virulent hedonism that most films only aspire to, with the film's protagonists circling the party making out with each other and the affluent elite they find themselves in the midst of, slathering themselves in alcohol and drugs while the unceasing cacophony pulls your soul out of the comfort of your seat. Soon the weaving and winding camera lands on a strobed-out Star of David hung on the wall, illuminating a group of IDF officers standing steadfast in the corner of the room. As Ariel Bronz's Y stumbles his way into the backyard, dunking his head in an orgiastic blend of punches and sangrias before crashing into the still waters of the pool, the officers stare on, stone faced. His wife Yasmin is the only one to move beyond the wall of quizzical onlookers, dragging him from beneath the inky water and bringing him back to the party, coughing up water only to continue his jester act of singing and dancing through the house.

The comedown of the party is almost as dizzying, a sickeningly efficient transition from one sensory assault to another, leaving the party after Yasmin pleads with Y to let the officers best him in a tense singing competition and finding themselves at the gaudy estate of a wealthy older woman. The couple sleep with her in a sequence as uncomfortably revolting as sex on screen gets, both in content and atmosphere, the growing realization that these protagonists are not a part of Israel's elite, but people who have sold themselves to it as a means of survival. Submission of body, soul, and all dignity, complete husks of existence who have abandoned their humanity in search of something unattainable, seeking to join the ruling class by way of pure subservience.

Nadav Lapid's scathing satire is overwhelmingly nauseating, a reflection of how submission and acceptance of evil as normal creates its own moral culpability, one that is constantly being paid in blood while you reap the benefits of your ignorance. Walks a thin line along a sickening ouroboros where the oppressive, constant image of overbearing nationalist propaganda is folded into survival, eventually consumed to become part of the machine in one way or another. It is by design that submission to the system is so effortless, that once one domino falls it becomes only inevitable that the poison seeps through every crack of society. It is the nature of fascism and a necessity of atrocity, to twist it in a way that makes it feel so immediate and inevitable.

Yes doesn't burn with the same fiery rage that flooded Lapid's aggressive Ahed's Knee, but it maintains a thread of introspection of wrestling with the idea of Israel through film. The clear delineation between the two films being pre- and post-October 7, what was once a righteous fury tinged with some semblance of hope for something better now reads as resigned defeat, now grappling with the idea of a state beyond repair, a fundamental sickness that wields power for death and submission by aggregating the endless wealth of oligarchs to fuel the treads of war. Much of Yes feels hopeless – every frame in its first act sports the visage of the Israeli flag as a kind of extant symbol of unavoidable oppression, its second act moves with methodical precision towards the inevitability of the Gaza border and what lies beyond it, and its final act soars with a sickening air of potent reality and resignation.

The rampant, irresponsible abandon that the first chapter of the film unfolds with necessitates its own response, a frenzied spiral of wanton excess that justifies Y's vehement assertion that "yes," and the submission that results from it, is the source of all happiness. On its face, it's certainly true that Y and Yasmine seem to have their lives figured out, as their lifestyle seems entirely fulfilled by this reckless abandon of spirit, dancing to techno in the kitchen and soaking up the sun as they coast through Tel Aviv on bikes on the way to earn their keep through contributing in various ways to the propaganda machine. It is a great annoyance whenever news of reality finds its way through, articles of the atrocities being committed appended with postscripts indicating that the army asserts it did not intend to kill children – something that Y blindly, and vocally, decides to believe to continue his blissful lie. Yasmine's annoyance is sourced from the fact that her son was born on October 8th, a notion that will only impede his future greatness, that someday his Wikipedia page will be marred by the fact he was born in the shadow of horror.

So as the two swirl around the war machine's elite, fraternizing with pure evil who do little to hide their intentions or their violent hatred for Palestinians, it only becomes increasingly inevitable that they will have to face the nature of the world they live in. And so it is Y's ambition that is leveraged to increase his complicity in the violence, his childhood dream of being a great pianist plucked out of thin air by a garish Russian oligarch who commissions Y to write a new national anthem for Israel. Confronting the extant reality of his situation by being forced to write something hateful enough to put all of Israel behind its bloodthirsty cry finally creates a pit of uncertainty within Y, but the promise of being able to escape Israel for an abstract future where the violence can be put safely out of mind while his music fuels the death of the innocent back home seems too tantalizing to pass up.

The film then becomes a nauseating road movie where Y abandons his family, lyrics to his (literally) blood-soaked anthem in hand, in search of some kind of deliverance to justify his project, to confront reality in a way he hopes will allow him to confidently move forward with his discarding of soul. The psychopathic energy of the first act slows to a crawl, now moving with an almost pensive pace as if to respond to the mania of its previous moments, forcing both Y and the audience to sit in the silence of the desert and bear witness to the atrocities that Israel has inflicted on Gaza, to truly confront the casual violence that the Israeli people live so close to while blissfully forgetting it exists at all. The search for justification only begets more of the naked reality of it all, that the violence is so horrifically evident, unceasing, and unforgiving, while people swallow the propaganda and parrot it out as if it means anything, never searching for truth, just saying it out loud until it squeaks out some kind of twisted purpose.

While the second act confronts the reality of it all and the third points itself towards a sort of empirical truth that defines the situation in a way that is as inevitable as it is revoltingly queasy, there is no sympathy for its protagonist, no redemption, no absolution. Even when he is pelted with rocks by the spirit of his mother, who was once capable of seeing through the propaganda and seeing the state for the destructive colonial monster it was, it is impossible to feel much other than revulsion for Y's monstrous series of decisions that lead him into the finale. It is tinged with the harrowing and mournful reality that this kind of authoritarianism is built with the purpose of consuming the promise of good people and spitting out more cogs in the machine of violence, but it only extends to its characters as far as it makes you sympathetic to the hopelessness that Lapid feels. After all, even in a world where an artist like Lapid could make something so venomous towards his birth nation, the shadow of the Israeli Film Fund looms over the film, creating its own moral ouroboros, where to even fight the power above you must first bend the knee and accept its help. The ambiguity of the film's ending is only reflective of how unknowable and impossible any path forward is.