At the start of Nadav Lapid’s audacious Yes, George Grosz’s 1926 painting The Pillars of Society appears in a plopped-open coffee table book after a particularly hedonistic party scene. Yud (Ariel Bronz), or Y, as he is credited (the letter is the closest English-language approximation of the Hebrew), a wild musician, and his wife, Yasmine (Efrat Dor), are playing an upper-crust event with heavy drug use and deafening EDM. Y recklessly allows the fancily clad partygoers to throw him around as a remix of La Bouche’s “Be My Lover” blares, dunking his head in a series of mysterious buffet-line liquids, each more neon than the previous, before he tumbles backwards into a pool.

Grosz’s painting, which informs the film’s ethos, was a rebuke against the upper classes of the Weimar Republic during World War I. Grosz was disgusted by his country’s fervent turn towards abject nationalism and Lapid, whose films have long been bold cinematic criticisms of his government, shows us a world in Yes that has become the modern equivalent of Nazism. That these people are Jews is only an ironic footnote. Where once we wondered how German civilians could live lives of excess while their “enemies” died en masse, in Lapid’s eyes, Israeli society now does the same. In several scenes, Y and Yasmine take on the most quotidian of tasks as news of destruction echoes in the distance.

Through Formal Invention & Cynical Satire, Yes Questions Israeli Nationalism

Yes takes place in Tel Aviv immediately after Hamas’s resistance attack on October 7, just as Y and Yasmine welcome their first child just one day later; all their lives are thrown into chaos by an inability to shut out the noise of a country thrown into what Lapid calls the “Gaza bloodbath.” Since 2008, the iconoclastic filmmaker has boldly used cinema as a rallying cry against his native country, screaming through his characters about “the Israeli disease,” as he called it in a post-screening Q&A at AFI Fest in Los Angeles.

What Lapid sees as a disease is a nationalistic refusal to accept the conditions upon which their peaceful lives depend. Those conditions (apartheid, racial discrimination, the constant threat of retaliatory rocket fire, mandatory military service) abound in the background of Yes like a nasty bug, scenic dressing which cannot be tuned out. Lapid, who lives in France in self-imposed exile, returned to Israel after the 7th to bear witness and realized, quickly, that he was immersing himself within the apocalypse. Like a terminal illness, the haptic feeling of Yes is the peculiarity of living a so-called normal life, even as your neighbors burn.

The first hour of Yes plays like Godard, with formal experimentation in service of Lapid’s scourge against Israeli hasbara, or propaganda. At turns hilarious, at others shockingly heartbreaking, Lapid repeatedly breaks cinematic boundaries. While Y and Yasmine cook at home and take care of their newborn, a sudden dance party is briefly interrupted by news alerts of bombings over the border wall. Y fries an egg and gets a ping notification of the deaths of 93 people after a residential building is destroyed. Briefly, we hear cries of anguish and shrapnel; no matter, just put the phone away.

Yasmine and Y get invited to yet another luxurious party to celebrate the 76th anniversary of the state of Israel, at which they rub shoulders with the Tel Aviv intelligentsia. There, a poorly-tanned, beach-blonde, incessant vape-smoking Avinoam (Sharon Alexander) presents as Israeli PR personified. Almost immediately upon his introduction, he breaks the fourth wall to call the audience antisemitic for not unequivocally backing Israeli aggression, admitting that he, and the country, are standing behind the cover of “war” to advance their interests.

Later, on the boat, Avinoam talks about manufactured propaganda, which he presents by shaking his head so hard that it turns into a flatscreen television. Y and Yasmine are barely making ends meet, and Y’s ambition is so heavy that he begs Big Billionaire, or The Russian (Aleksey Serebryakov), a tech mogul, to give him a chance at financial success. Y is then tasked with writing the music for a new national anthem with lyrics that proudly boast of burning Gaza to the ground in a disturbing song the right-wing Civil Front has created from the ashes of a patriotic 1947 classic.

After the raucous first hour, Yes‘s final 90 minutes are (somewhat) more sober. Y seemingly abandons Yasmine and his son, Noah, to work on his money-making hit, while the latter takes increasingly desperate measures to get paid by her employer at the gym. In the countryside, Y runs into an old flame, Lea (Naama Preis), a former Army trekker, and, in between heated recollections of their old relationship, the two drive alongside the Gaza border and reflect on a country that may be irrevocably lost.

In one blistering, open-wound of a section, Lea breathlessly recounts the hours of a family being torn apart by insurgents. “People say you can’t imagine what it’s like to live in Gaza, but you also can’t imagine what it’s like to be Israeli.” True enough, and if anything, Lapid is not just concerned with the obliteration of Palestinian lives but also the cultural and religious stain of Zionism. Who does any of this bloodshed benefit?

Implicitly, the film satirizes the excess of a society that dissociates through its supposed freedoms. As heavy beats filter through so much of the first half of the film, Lapid references the music festival at which Hamas’s attack first began, as if to question how a country has let itself go so far away from normalcy that the concert can even exist at all — let alone be hijacked and turned into a death pit.

As Y loses more and more of his moral compass in pursuit of moneyed interests for the state, Lapid further pokes at the ease with which state-sponsored media and messaging can be consumed. Sitting in the park one day, Y gets a stream of horrific headlines of deaths in Gaza, followed by one that says the Army is taking pains to reduce civilian casualties. “I believe the Army,” Y says to himself, putting his phone away. A self-evident, bleakly funny admission of willful ignorance.

Yes is an astonishing protest film whose comedy belies a broken heart. With Shai Goldman’s camera freely moving like a conscious observer, the film questions what it means to witness, and what the responsibility is for a film audience placidly watching as an entire people’s existence is threatened. “I want to kill our parents,” Yasmine charges over dinner at a fine-dining establishment, “they sold us a world that doesn’t exist.” For Lapid and his characters, the question is what to do with the one that exists in reality. Both Y and Yasmine dream of leaving Israel behind for greener pastures. But is abandonment a privilege, a curse, or a necessary means of survival?