The Most Controversial Movie of the Year is Here. It’s Called ‘Yes’

It starts not with a bang, but a Bacchanalia that would make Caligula blush. People dressed to the nines are gyrating and grinding away to La Bouche’s “Be My Lover,” including several uniformed soldiers and a rabbi. A woman in a shiny, skimpy dress kisses random partygoers before dancing on a table. A man fellates a baguette. Soon, people are dunking his head into a series of punch bowls. Drunk, he stumbles backwards into a pool. A crowd gathers. The woman strips and jumps in, pulling him out; revived, he begins engaging in a sing-off with military officers. He’s screaming the la-da-da-dee-da-da-da-daaah hook of the dance anthem. They’re bellowing “Love Me Tender” in a manner that resembles a patriotic fight song. Just let them win, she wisely counsels. Eventually, the soiree ends. The couple will spend the remainder of the early morning hours in a threesome with an elderly society matron, sucking on her earlobes.

Right from the jump, Yes — the latest shot fired from writer-director Nadav Lapid — wants to slap you awake. It has no time for niceties in a time of conflict, tragedy, and infinite vulgarities. Arguably the most important filmmaker to come out of Israel in several generations and a major presence on the world-cinema scene, Lapid specializes in character studies and constant interrogations about the way that power structures (social, national, global) shape lives. He’s said that this story of a creative class caught up in a corrupt system designed to professionally reward a lack of morality could have taken place in any major metropolis: London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles. The plan, the director added, had been to film in America and cast Joaquin Phoenix in the lead. He was joking. Possibly.

The fact that Lapid set it in his birth place of Tel Aviv, however, and filmed in a country with which he’s had a mercurial relationship, adds various wrinkles to what he’s getting at with this arsenic-laced satire. Both hard-right and far-left factions in Israel have denounced it. Their version of the Oscars also gave it a handful of nominations. International distributors praised the filmmaker while treating the film like it was radioactive. Yes is easily the most controversial film to hit theaters this year so far. It’s also, for all of the intoxicating rush of Lapid’s excessive style and cup-spilleth-over storytelling, one of the more sobering and vital ones as well.

The couple we saw cavorting with the rich and powerful earlier? They’re named Y. (Ariel Bronz) and Yasmine (Efrat Dor). He’s a pianist and songwriter, she’s a dancer. They love their baby son, Noah. They love their upper-middle-class, bohemian-urbanite life. And they truly, madly, deeply love each other. That ménage à trois has earned them further entry into an even more elite world, which appeals to both of their desires to move up the social ladder. Notably, it gets them on the yacht of a Russian oligarch (played by Anora and Nobody‘s resident stand-in for post-Soviet patriarchal authority, Aleksy Serebryakov). He has an offer for Y.: write “a new anthem for a new Israel… an anthem for the victory generation.” Should he accept, this assignment will set him and his family up for life. The only thing it will cost Y. is his soul.

Through out Yes‘s first half, Lapid keeps the volume and the velocity stuck on 11 — there are scenes in which you feel like the camera itself is having a seizure. Chaos reigns, whether it’s the film’s set pieces that resemble cracked musical numbers, party scenes stuffed with Felliniesque grotesques, or even the way the couple’s amour fou passion ends with both of them putting their heads through a door. Bronz is best known as performance artist and an avant-garde poet, but he’s a first-rate physical comedian, all rubber limbs and 10,000-watt energy. Ditto Dor, a former ballerina who pitches her character’s upwardly mobile striver somewhere between sultry slapstick and an interpretive dance. It’s the sort of movie that thinks nothing of dropping in a human-centipede roundabout of bootlicking and the surreal sight of a PR guru’s head turning into a video screen.

What’s playing on that magical cranial monitor, however, is one half of the shadow self that lurks behind all of Yes‘s provocations. Bragging that his brain contains a horrific scene of an atrocity committed on a date that now lives in infamy, this toxic publicist transforms into a conduit of visuals so disturbing that we do not see them; only Y. does, and the scream he lets out as the film cuts to a long shot is enough. The specter of October 7th, 2023, hovers over the movie, as does the aftermath that’s left thousands more dead. And once Y. ends up fleeing to the border, first for inspiration and then to meet up with Lea (Naama Preis), an old friend and romantic crush, Lapid slows things down to a more contemplative pace. She now works as a translator for witness accounts of that tragedy, and the film lets her recount what she’s read in short, sharp shocks. Characters also speak explicitly of what’s happening in Gaza, as we see smoke on the horizon. Massacres beget massacres.

There are hints along the way, from a shot of George Grosz’s 1926 painting The Pillars of Society to a breaking of the fourth wall (a character turns to us, the viewers, and asks: “Every one of you has a secret that would get you killed on the spot, if I were to reveal it… We’ve got a war. What have you got?”), that lets you know how Lapid feels about the contemporary state of affairs. By the time we get to hear the fruit of Y.’s labors, which borrows from an actual propaganda song, we realize we have not been watching a comedy. Yes is, in fact, a horror movie, in which no amount of swiping on your phone can drown out the cacophony of death. And while Lapid has embedded political perspectives and critiques in everything from his extraordinary 2011 debut Policeman to his 2019 portrait of an ex-pat Synonyms, this one feels different, more pointed, far more angry. No amount of outrageousness can mask the outrage.

“There are only two words in the world,” Y. tells his infant son, as he bikes through the streets and past the beaches of Tel Aviv. “Yes, and No. Which do you choose?” The movie itself operates on that same binary. Can you ignore what’s done in your name? Yes or no. If power was dangled in front of you, would you grab at it no matter what the cost? Yes or no. Is such an existential shriek into the abyss regarding how one holds onto their morality and sense of self, all while living in a society suffused by mind-numbing grief and nationalism, worth subjecting yourself to in the name of hard questions? That last one, at least, is easier than the others. The answer is in the film’s title.