Presented to the 15 filmmakers, Yes Nadav Lapid would have earned his place in the official selection, where he would have had serious assets to win the Palme d'or. The programmers had yet to know how to say « yes » political courage. Far from the cruise lights, it's a preview Strasbourg at the Star Saint-Exupéry that we saw and reviewed the film before talking with Nadav Lapid. In this vitriol portrait of Israeli society after 7 October, Israeli filmmaker and writer, fiercely opposed to IDF policy, abandoned the question of « No » who was animating his last films, to question the submission of his compatriots. Behind this love story, Yes is a magnifying mirror with carnival edges, which reflects the cracks of a people rushed at all speed into the great grinder of war, erected in perpetual horizon. What remains of the desire behind the bursting noise of disaster?
Interview with Nadav Lapid, director of Yes
«There are only two words in the world: yes and no, which one do you choose?»
He is a precarious jazz musician, his wife Yasmine is a dancer who also bathes in spheres close to power. Y. was given a very paid mission to write a new national anthem. The first sequence of opening Yes translates only the film's device. A plan grabs the couple who kisses by turning Yasmine on herself. A revolution of the subject which ends with the sign of harpocrat addressed to camera: Yasmine, the index on his lips, commands us to silence, as if we had to renounce the secrets that the filmmaker is about to reveal to us.
In Egyptian antiquity, the finger on the mouth symbolized the silence of the archanes of the Gods. This invitation to silence, the filmmaker deprives us of most of the film. After these first seconds, it's the fumes that arise. The camera moves back and the party starts. It is the world of the night where religious, jet-set and other staff members mix together. In the first seconds, we see behind the crowd a massive and luminous star of David. Y. is demeanable, drunk, head plunged into punch bucket. Never stop dancing, at all costs, even if you lose your head and risk drowning. It's the « song war » which starts against the staff, but Y. can't resist, Yasmine recalls. « Let the Chief of Staff win » She begged, as if the political question were being raised to another level.
Yes cultivates many commonalities with a musical, or rather a « musical tragedy » in the words of Nadav Lapid. The film has something very dramatic in the literal sense of the term. It is a space from which one contemplates this pathetic spectacle. While Y. and Yasmine recede in front of the General Staff's legged men who sing in Hebrew concert, their eyes revulsed like possessed. Their voice in the heart almost covers the music. Two realities clash and one of them cannot win. Propaganda, by nature, spreads and infiltrates everywhere. The narrator takes over and quotes between two fulgurances, The pillars of society George Grosz. A sign that speaks volumes: the German painter, who returned deeply traumatized from the Great War, painted this painting in 1926, at the time when nationalism was rooted in German society.
The artist that was nicknamed « Marshal Propagandada » The political elites of the time led his country into the country. The comparison between Grosz's canvas and Lapid's film makes sense. The German painter foreshadowed the rise of fascism, « Union of forces » of the bourgeoisie, of the nobility, of the clergy, of the politicians and of the army which, together, contributed to the ruin.
For Grosz, Art was the mirror of the ugliness of the world; its avant-garde style of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) represented reality without falsification or idealization, these characteristic fatty traits gave to see a sharp caricature at the dawn of Nazism. Nadav Lapid is deliberately part of this critical tradition of reacting to a single reading of reality. This week, the filmmaker did not mingle his words on France Culture:
« The best thing the world can do for Israel today is to put a mirror of the size of the Pacific Ocean in front of the faces of the Israelis so that they can see themselves in a raw and cruel light and see what we are committing and what we have become.»
Cynical, Yes abandons the hopes of the director's first films to question the emptiness of the word « resist » in a world that has long been turned. Yes translates all the ambivalences of a contemporary Israeli artist of genocide. This is what should be read behind Y, disused musician, passive figure, converted into propaganda and who, soon, will adopt all the dress codes of the propagandists whom he despised so much. From head to toe, until his discolored hairstyle, Y. becomes the caricature of himself. It is his identity that is effaced to the benefit of a society religiously placed behind the IDF.
Can we still be « proud to walk against society ?» questions the narrator before correcting immediately: « The courage was to say yes, yes, yes. ». Yes adopts a post-language grammar in the sense that « words no longer describe the world. Words have been emptied of their meaning », explains Nadav Lapid. For illustration the filmmaker also shows how the accusation of anti-Semitism was declined until exhaustion during an obvious guignolesque sequence. « War is peace » yesterday, « Love sanctified by blood » Today. The same process of subverting, if not methodically emptying words of their meaning.
As for Y., he speaks very little but it is his body that expresses: he dances and refuses any second of silence. This is also the reason for the wealth and profusion of images that flow without respite in Yes, which gives the feeling that we should never suffer from silence. This « eternal brutality of sound and image, the fact that the brain is infinitely bombarded, bombarded, bombarded » translates on the screen into an ecstatic camera. Frenetics, the latter is like taking seizures during sequences that go beyond the traditional framework of cinema codes. Same thing for the sound device. If there were a second of silence to get out of this permanent chaos, an opportunity, even a tiny one, would suffice to reflect. « Maybe something could have changed. » concluded Nadav Lapid, returning from Tel Aviv the very morning of our exchange, the fluttering voice under the weight of opposite emotions.
The command of revenge
This overflowing opulence displayed on the screen, the spectator must make it his own; A second view is almost essential to capture in flight all these trajectories that destroy Y. and Yasmine. Yes gives « The impression that if you don't say everything, you don't understand anything. ». By refusing to make Y. a political figure, the film becomes a political object. Sometimes the characters break the fourth wall and address directly to us, as in this unlikely sequence where the head of the propaganda -literally- at the head of the screen takes us: « Even the viewer hates Israel ». We also feel the paradox of seeking a chaotic but aesthetic approach. The filmmaker directs our gaze where the research of « Beautiful » is systematically defiled.
« As long as you struggle to handle a camera until you reach something that can transcend your subject, as long as you believe in the strength of a filming object and a filmed object, you are necessarily looking for beauty. It is a film that by its formal way tries all the time to find small redemptions, inside a kind of rather sad reality.»
If Yes cultivates common points with the springs of the genre of musical, it is also by its polyphonic aspect. Far from being a manician and even less a learner, the film projectes all the neurosis of Israeli society and these very real traumas. During one of the rare sequences away from Tel Aviv, on the « Hill of Love » where the youth used to come and savour the bombardments on Gaza, Yes meticulously unfolds the words of the victims on 7 October. « I know the story of every death » announces a young woman journalist, she also converts into propaganda. When Y. asked him to tell the disaster of October 7, he followed a monologue who made the silence deafening.
« Violated, maimed, killed, raped, maimed, killed », the repeated qualifiers are no longer sufficient to transcribe what happened on October 7. « And theirs ? »Those who a few miles away disappear under the bombs. The hatred of the other, the hatred of the self, the hatred of the living: triple punishment that afflicts these ordinary characters who seem systematically to escape themselves. How can we build and transmit joy to succeeding generations when the previous generations had already sealed the future? In a country where no more seconds leave room for the intimate and where every desire limits to obscenity, what path to choose? The first time a child walks, an exit to the park, a romantic dinner... everything is dirty. Y. and Yasmine prostitute themselves to always satisfy a little more staff, unless it is only about staying in motion. The humiliation, however, is constant until this melody of Death chosen for hymn in the last chapter.
I believe IDF
« Reign as soon as possible. Resignation is happiness » Ironically preaches the narrator. Yes is an electroshock that grabs us to the throat when the real slips into the middle of fiction. From the distant panoramas of Gaza under the bombs to the scenes of national concord in the streets to the apotheosis of horror with this propagandist hymn, fiction is the rush revealing The obscenity of reality. Yes shows a society turned towards itself, indifferent to what is happening a few kilometers from its borders that a fanatical power would want to push back to realize the Zionist dream of « Great Israel ». Against his own people and against our common humanity, the residual one that we still read behind the couple of Y. and Yasmine who would like to build... Build what? Two sick and negative characters, two characters gathered by the same letter Y, one is passive, the other combative but both thrown into the same dead end.
If the real is never far from fiction, Nadav Lapid refuses to pronounce the name Netanyahu, Smotrich and other politicians who are only the symptom of a « collective disease » otherwise deeper. Yes also has a universalistic dimension. Evidence of this, the propagandist of the General Staff expresses, without justification, in Russian (not Hebrew) in the last chapter of the film entitled « Twilight ». With YesNadav Lapid traces a singular voice in a world increasingly contaminated by resignation. The same collective blindness that led, a century earlier, to fascism.
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