Director Nadav Lapid’s brilliant, showy set-pieces present a caricature of decadence and heartlessness in a society haunted by 7 October.
YES is a fierce, stylised confrontational caricature-satire in its sexualised choreography thats 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 anti-semitic butchery of 7 October. It is inspired by the activist group Civic Front which post 7 October released a new version of Haim Gouri’s classic song Hareut, with jarring new lyrics calling for wholesale extermination in Gaza.
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 and their three year-old baby in Tel Aviv.
They are enjoying an almost frantic life of partying, booze and drugs, amidst 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, with the apparent patronage of a wealthy Russian (Aleksei Serebyakov) and, brought to the edge of some profound emotional breakdown by the strain of processing the agony of 7 October ,perhap by the suspicion that the response is futile vengeance.
Y abandons his family and reconnects with his old lover Leah (Naama Preis). Leah, a translator with access to restricted official documents, can give him authentic details about the 7 October atrocity—details that Y simultaneously fears and demands while being seized with a desire to scream his poem from Golani Hill, otherwise known as the Hill of Love which overlooks Gaza City itself.
As before with Lapid’s work, there are brilliant, showy set pieces: the opening party scenes are a marvel of of extremity and jaded sensuality.
There is a monumental scene where 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.”
This is the paradox within which this film lives and which Israel knows deeply.
