A still from Yes!, the latest feature film by Nadav Lapid.Supplied
One of the biggest shocks at Cannes was that Yes!, the fifth feature by Israel’s most acclaimed filmmaker Nadav Lapid, was passed over for the film festival’s official competition. Lapid previously won festival prizes in Locarno, Switzerland; Berlin; and Cannes, with Ahed’s Knee in 2021. Instead, Yes! unfurled, as the festival waned, down the Croisette as part of the Directors’ Fortnight.
One of the biggest shocks, that is, until an audience had a chance to see the film.
Also arguably Israel’s most controversial director, Lapid baked a potato so hot that Cannes chief Thierry Frémaux didn’t dare touch it. A filmmaker committed to placing Israeli society under sharp critical scrutiny, Lapid pumps up the volume in Yes!, directly drawing parallels of a decadent Israel today to Weimar Germany, with George Grosz’s 1926 painting Pillars of Society seen at a boisterous pool party. And that’s just the prelude.
Lapid’s protagonist, Y, a musical comedian and sometimes prostitute (played by avant-garde performance artist Ariel Bronz) is tasked with composing the score for a new fascistic national anthem post-October 7. This hideous song, we will discover, is perhaps the least fictional part of Lapid’s raucous provocation.
Lapid previously won festival prizes in Locarno, Switzerland; Berlin; and Cannes, with his film Ahed’s Knee in 2021.JOEL SAGET/AFP/Getty Images
To summarize this overstuffed film any more would be futile. Yes! is a constantly inventive, abrasive tour de force that makes most of the polished competition at Cannes look like made-for-TV movies. It’s a divisive political film eager to anger all sides, a no-win proposition slathered with an obscene messiness that aptly reflects the time in which we live, inside Israel and out.
A visibly exhausted Lapid sat down to chat on the beach the day before the film’s premiere, a week after he completed postproduction. This rush to finish is typical of many films in Cannes, itself a garish market of conspicuous consumption where a film’s selection means a higher selling price, but in Lapid’s case seemed to speak to his obsession with being a filmmaker of the present.
“I feel that cinema is the best tool to talk about the actual moment,” he explained. “For me, each film I do is about the world right now. The tragedy of fiction cinema very often is that it limits itself to itself. While the world is huge, you see only one small corner.”
What changed in the world after Ahed’s Knee, of course, was October 7. Lapid had a screenplay ready to go featuring the same musician protagonist, but felt obliged to address current events head on. He rewrote the plot and shot scenes surreptitiously on the border at the “Hill of Love” overlooking Gaza, with explosions in the distance.
“I understood that the Israeli DNA is passing through an accelerated process of modification. I wanted to put on a screen what I was seeing when my eyes were open,” said Lapid.
“I think that anyone who would have watched my films before October 7 wouldn’t be so surprised to see this. I mean, I think that October 7 is already in a way in my previous films. In all my films there is an obsession for trying to dig as deep as possible into the collective ethos, collective ego, collective self of Israel. In a strange way, I’m a big patriot, in that if you understand Israel, you understand the world.”
In spite of the seismic shift, the majority of scenes from the original script remain, as Yes! asks the same essential questions: What does it mean to be an artist today who wants to avoid politics? What does it mean to be positive in a negative world? Is it possible to only say “yes”?
“One might say that the film is still about someone who wants to be a hero of a musical and becomes the villain of a political film,” Lapid continued, “just the degree of the heat went higher and higher. You feel that the film is boiling while showing this obscenity.
“The film insists, in a polemic way, in showing everything, in a kind of process of self-annihilation. It has a kind of bulimic appetite because I feel that if you do not show everything, you do not show anything …”
But not everything is shown. The words “Hamas,” “Netanyahu” and “hostages” never appear. Lapid is a political filmmaker who rejects giving concrete moral lessons or, indeed, making the kind of propaganda we see produced throughout Yes!
“Safe films that are done in a dangerous world are propaganda for the actual order. Yes! isn’t a documentary about the situation but wants to dig inside its essence. While shooting the protagonist, I always tried at the same time to capture reality in the background.”
Nor does Lapid present the Palestinian perspective, even if he’s aware this will be another cause for criticism.
“I try to film what I understand. And what I think I understand is the way Israelis see themselves and the world. And in the way Israel looks at the world, Palestinians are nonexistent. And yet they are always there: They are the shadow, the reflection in the mirror. Their absence in the film is extremely loud.”
One can easily understand why it’s a miracle Yes! even got made. Numerous Israeli actors and craftspeople refused to work on the film, one even telling Lapid that if he did so, he wouldn’t be able to look at himself in the mirror ever again. As of writing, the film has no Israeli distribution.
“It’s stupid to complain, but making this film was clearly the hardest thing I did in my life. But I’m not sure today that ‘no’ is still a valid word. Financing the film was almost impossible. Against its will, the film became a battle of power between cowardness and courage that keeps going on to this day. I mean, maybe it’s the reason we’re talking on this beach and not on another beach down the road.”
Special to The Globe and Mail
