That delirious excess befits the essence of Lapid’s method, which is a fusion of fiction with indigestibly and irreducibly nonfictional elements. That method was also evident in his previous feature, “Ahed’s Knee” (2021), in which a filmmaker (likewise referred to as Y) confronts censorship in Israel’s cultural bureaucracy while contending with his mother’s grave illness. (The next film Y is planning, meanwhile, is about a real-life incident: a young Palestinian woman’s act of protest and an Israeli official’s statement that he wishes she’d been shot.) And Lapid’s preceding movie, “Synonyms” (2019), was about a young man named Yoav—starts with “Y”—who, intending to shed his Israeli identity, moves to Paris, which is where Lapid now lives. By comparison with these films, Lapid’s approach to both fantasy and nonfiction in “Yes” is far freer. Much that’s memorable in the new movie is nonfictional in an ordinary, baseline, yet therefore all the more startling way. Biking in the city, Y passes through a tunnel adorned with an enormous Israeli flag; walking at night, he’s in the presence of a crowd that’s exulting to a band’s performance, streamed on an enormous screen, of a patriotic song. Travelling from Tel Aviv to the Dead Sea in search of meditative solitude, Y passes a wall that divides Israeli from Palestinian territory, goes through a checkpoint, drives on a road for (he says) Jewish drivers only, and passes a prison where, he says, a thousand Palestinian people are being held captive.
The very core of the movie—the song that Y is to set—likewise bears the crucial stamp of nonfiction. In a prologue and an epilogue, Lapid emphasizes that it’s a found object, based on a 1947 song that, after the October 7th attacks, was “distorted” into a rant of hate and vengeance; lest we doubt this, he includes an actual published video of children singing the song. The use of a prologue is noteworthy, and similar to the way that Lapid began “Ahed’s Knee” with news accounts of the incidents on which that movie was based. The fictions of both films are factually contextualized from the start. But “Yes” differs from “Ahed’s Knee” in that it also contains a sort of documentary, one that’s integrated more tangibly into the drama and, for that reason, less responsibly.
Y calls Lea, his ex, who drives over to pick him up near the Dead Sea. After a meal at a hotel, he urges her to go west, to the border with Gaza. There, they get advice from a soldier, who tells them where they can get a clear view of the Israeli strikes—a place appallingly called the Hill of Love. Y climbs it and looks out, seeing large clouds of smoke rise while gunfire and explosions resound in the distance; it’s death in real time. The inclusion of such a scene with a fictional character standing before it is a breach of decency that reflects the general limits of “Yes”: the limits of form. The moment demands, instead, that people stand there and speak in their own names—whether the actor Bronz, breaking character, or Lapid himself, breaking the narrative context, or both, in order to enfold in the very form of the movie the enormity, the incommensurability, of the documentary reality.
Incorporating the real-life war in the movie’s fictional setting brought to mind another recent film about Israel’s war on Gaza, “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” by the Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania, in which an actual recording of a child from Gaza who was trapped in a car under siege by Israeli forces is integrated into a dramatization of representatives at Palestine’s emergency-services offices who spoke with her and recorded the call. In both films, the effect is of a diminution, a depersonalization—not to say, a desecration of the experience of horror that the documentary element embodies. (My colleague Justin Chang, reviewing Ben Hania’s film, criticized its “roughshod mistreatment of primary material.”)
It’s all the more striking, in “Yes,” because Lapid also constructs a brilliant, moving, and thoughtful scene by which to approach the horrors endured by Israelis during the October 7th attacks. Lea, it turns out, became an official Army propagandist after the attacks, and her duties involve issuing, to international media, accounts of the atrocities that were inflicted on Israeli victims. At Y’s insistence, she tells him about them as they drive. The scene is all talking, much of it of Lea in closeup, and it’s written and performed with wide-ranging awareness and complex motives and emotions. The litany of horrors is also a horror of litanies: the authentic pain of the victims is both contained and debased in the propagandistic digest, in the professional way in which it is dispensed—along with Lea’s self-questioning about her role in disseminating it. Here, Lapid achieves a remarkable balance: Lea’s monologue about realities and representations simultaneously dignifies traumatic experience and critiques the packaging of trauma. And yet, in the scene on the Hill of Love, Lapid offers no self-questioning, no sense of cinematic exertion or trouble, in the fictional framing of the real agonies of Gaza.
