ARIEL BRONZ IN YES

Another provocative film about Israel from Nadav Lapid

As you contemplate the widening of conflict in the Middle East aggravated by Trump's aggressive policies toward Iran urged on by Israel, you may watch Nadav Lapid's 2025 Yes, a boldly satirical and cinematic response (maybe not all that cinematic) to October 7 and the Israeli response to it that shows the director's current state of outrage at what his native land has become. Hamas, you may recall, killed about 1,200 Israelis, largely civilians, and took about 251 hostages, a majority of whom have since been released. In response, Israel has attacked the civilian population of Gaza so far for two and a half years, killing about 75,000 and leaving the strip largely in rubble after a series of heavy bombing raids unmatched by anything since World War II. Israeli bellicosity finally reached its zenith. Despite the UN commissions and rapporteurs who classified the Israeli attack on Gaza as "genocide and war crimes," Israelis in polls don't regard their country's actions as disproportionate.

In this context, living for several years in Paris but returning frequently to Israel, Lapid shot his satire Yes (in Hebrew, "Ken") in his native land "under the radar," much as some dissident Iranian filmmakers have made films surreptitiously in Iran. As of April 2026, Lapid’s latest film is surrounded by intense controversy at home. It may feel that the will to confront and provoke outweighed the impulse toward order. But Yes is as lively and interesting a film as Ahed's Knee, if not as much fun as the first part of Synonyms.

To go back a bit: the director's Kindergarten Teacher (2014) followed a precocious five-year-old and the teacher who tries and fails to rescue him from the morally deforming effects of Israeli society. In Synonyms (2019), the feisty young Israeli protagonist (Tom Mercier, a discovery who made this my favorite Lapid film so far) has, like Lapid himself, escaped to Paris, where he exaggeratedly, almost comically, forswears his identity, even renouncing Hebrew in favor of French. He outright loathes his country of origin, and indeed may be getting lost in this obsession, though Mercier's playful, performative style carries us through most of the way. In the more recent Ahed’s Knee (2021) the director more prosaically depicts an Israeli filmmaker who gives a talk lambasting his country. Ahed's Knee is less of an enjoyable jeu d'esprit, but another open display of loathing.

With Yes Lapid, perhaps seeking a more complex formula, finds an objective correlative for his dissatisfactions in a louche young couple: Y - pronounced "yud,"(played by Ariel Bronz), an avant-garde jazz musician, and his wife Yasmin (played by Efrat Dor), a vibrant dancer. They are performers in Tel Aviv who sell their talents and bodies as, say, sexy disco clowns, wildly performing, partying, and debasing themselves in colorful fashion for rich people, while navigating life after the October 7 attacks with a small child. Y, previously a left-wing activist, meets a government "PR guru," Avinoam (Sharon Alexander), who has bleach-blond hair that looks like Peter Sellers in a Pink Panther film - though that turns out to be the look of propaganda sellouts. The guru gets Y a lucrative propaganda job through a Russian Big Billionaire (Aleksey Serebryakov): composing a new, inflammatory wartime anthem (based on a real old one) hyping the bombing of Gaza and pumping up nationalist sentiment (as if it wasn't pumped up enough). He sets about to write a revised version of the poem "Hareut" to accomplish this.

Lapid evokes the German expressionist caricaturist George Grosz at the outset and has said this is a film that's like what you'd get if Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest (2023) had been made by Fritz Lang during World War II. He seems wildly referential here, and the extravagance reminded me of Fellini, but there are other, Israeli, models I don't know. Or perhaps with the couple subjugated, not entirely unpleasantly, by the rich, Lapid was reminded, as I was, of Ruben Östlund's Triangle of Sadness? The trouble is that Lapid has opened up the film too much to everything and everybody, and as before, he's a bit weak on narrative structure. This doesn't need to be two and half hours long. Or perhaps it does, for Lapid, because of the premise: learning to say "no" by saying "yes." His male protagonist seeks to survive in an Israel he detests by outwardly embracing its values.

But we do not quite see Y do that. In the meandering second half of the film, he goes on a long drive with his ex, Leah (wonderfully played by Naama Preis, who is Lapid's wife), whom he apparently longed for from childhood and who in contrast to his wife Yasmin, mother of their child, Noah, who is busty and blonde-ish, is petite, dark, short haired, and a bit haunted. She, like Y, is now a propagandist, specialized in spreading tales of October 7 Palestinian atrocities in multiple languages; and she recalls some of them at length now, in her car with Y, and brings herself to tears. But are atrocities in killing 1,200 as bad as killing 75,000 by bombardments in prolonged retaliation? For Israelis, emphatically Yes! But they must work constantly at self-motivation, and Leah is a motivator.

They drive to the edge of Gaza and watch the actual fighting in real time - which feels like several kinds of travesty - from a sort of Lovers' Point. Later Leah returns home to her own child and nanny, and in a phantasmal passage Y rolls down a hill and stones rain down on him. He cries out apologizing for writing the disgusting propaganda song calling for Palestinian blood and for being a coward. A voiceover (spoken by Wenzel Banneyer), very Nouvelle Vague, says: "The Israelis, who grew up with the question, How could a people live normally while perpetrating horror? have themselves become the answer." Here, Y's address to his dead mother and editor (Lapid's died at 70 in 2018) is more autobiographical material from the director; Y/Lapid addresses his mother again in the last moments of the film. Y returns to Yasmin to find she's turned against him - unless he keeps their plan to migrate together to Cyprus, where they played a gig for rich people early in the film, and later he agrees to leave for an undecided place in Europe, to raise their child away from Israel and Middle Eastern wars.

Instead, the film ends with Big Billionaire back for a celebratory sound and light performance of Y's commissioned jingoistic kill-Gaza poem-song, performed by a couple of dozen Israeli children; and the biggest irony is that these Israeli children probably eat it up. Actually, the song was a real song and the children were recorded earlier, in a "real" un-satirical context, here CGI-manipulated for satirical effect. Yasmin is disgusted by Y. But the couple agree to leave Israel together, nonetheless.

Lapid's next film will be made in France, where he now lives.

Yes (Hebrew: !כן , Yes!, romanized: Ken!), 150 mins., premiered at Cannes May 22 in Directors' Fortnight, also shown at Munich, Karlovy Vary, Jerusalem, Rio, Bangkok, Rome, Woodstock, AFI, Vienna, Taipei, and other international and US festivals. Screened for this review for its US theatrical release by Kino Lorber (including San Francisco) Apr. 10, 2026. The distributor plans for a VOD release May 12. Metacritic rating: 85%; AlloCiné critics 4.1=82%, spectators 3.4=68%.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.