YES | 2025 Cannes Film Festival Review

Break My Soul: Lapid Explores Compromised Artistry During Wartime

Essentially, YES, the latest film from Israeli auteur Nadav Lapid, is a portrait of an artist as a compromised man. Its innocuous title is essentially a rebuke of a contemporary reality relating to submission as the only real truth of the world. Collectively and individually, we no longer have the luxury of saying ‘no.’ Resistance is futile, we must comply. Destined for instant controversy and an eventual time capsule documenting Israel’s normalizing of barbarism, Lapid’s latest is an admonition of almost shocking import, an increasingly rare example of modern art speaking truth to power.

October 07, 2023. The Palestinian militant group Hamas launch armed incursions in Israeli territory, slaughtering over 1,200 Jews and committing countless other acts of sexual assault and depravity. A ruthless retaliation from Israel, including an extensive bombing campaign and the ongoing invasion of Gaza ensued. Somewhere in this aftermath, Y (Ariel Bronz), a jazz musician, and his wife Jasmine (Efrat Dor), sell themselves as entertainers to Israel’s elite. There is nothing sacred they will not sell, including their own bodies. With a baby at home, they plot to leave behind Israel as soon as they can. But Y is commissioned by Avonaam (Sharon Alexander) to write a new musical anthem for Israel, a battle cry to unite the nation, financed by a Russian billionaire (Alexey Serebryakov). Y, aware he would betray his ideals, seeks solace in his ex-girlfriend Leah (Naama Preis), while Jasmine rebels against her husband’s capitulation.

Yes opens with all the bombast of a Sorrentino film, introducing us to Y and Jasmine as they entertain a bevy of wealthy hedonists at some wild bacchanalian, which feels Babylonic with a burning and bombed Gaza in the background. “Be My Lover” by La Bouche blasts over the couple, with Y drunkenly spinning about like a silent film star, evoking the physical, comic violence of a Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin. Slowly, it becomes clear the couple are the entertainment, heralding the film’s first of three chapters, “The Good Life.” The first significant compromise of Y happens here, standing down in a screaming song contest with the chief of general staff. They are taken home by an aging party matron who uses them to lick the inside of her ears until she orgasms. It’s garish, sleazy, and over the top.

As Y and Jasmine, Ariel Bronz and Efrat Dor are an odd couple, contradictory in look and temperament, kind of like pairing Pete Davidson with Kathy Ireland. And yet, their mutual need for destructive escapism may keep them together. Bombarded with drastic news alerts about bombings and rising death tolls, Lapid accompanies these moments with sounds of terror and distress on the soundtrack, juxtaposed with the sun-dappled frivolity of Tel Aviv. It’s reminiscent of Haneke’s jarring use of heavy metal music in “Funny Games,” (1997) – it’s impossible to escape a sense of fatalism and doom.

Lapid showcases the 1926 painting by George Grosz, The Pillars of Society, a caricature of German elitists who supported fascism. The grotesqueness of the subjects is what Lapid has accomplished in cinematic form with Yes, and Y becomes representative of all the artists who worked within and for oppressive regimes. It’s clear Y has no interest in politics, and like many people, artists or otherwise, it’s arguably natural to want to avoid grappling with stark, grim realities, especially if one has the privilege of not having to. But he hypothetically sells his soul to write the commissioned lyrics to a new Israeli national anthem (which is, in reality, an actual call to carnage and violence sung by children and broadcast on Israeli television in 2023), and, one might wonder, did Lena Riefenstahl ever feel guilty for “Triumph of the Will,” (1935)?

The second and third chapters, “The Path” and “The Night,” respectively, feel like the aftermath of a hangover, as if the film itself is sobering up as Y is forced to approach reality. He turns to Lea, an ex-girlfriend from his school days, and for whom he has always carried a torch (or maybe it’s a torch for the semblance of innocence he can never return to). Naama Preis has the only real emotional outburst as Lea in the lone dialogue heavy segment of the film. She abandoned her musical past and now focuses on documenting the daily, ongoing miseries and casualties. Y believes he must physically see Gaza, and so they take a road trip (after a bittersweet moment of revelry on a restaurant piano) and gaze at Gaza from a vantage point known as the ‘Hill of Love,’ where Israeli families would picnic to watch bombings. Considering this is actual aural and visual footage of Gaza, there’s a queasy sense of complicity for the audience, comfortably consuming from our passive vantage point in the safety of the theater.

Israel is itself a state of mind, impossible to escape, with 2021’s Ahed’s Knee (read review) cinematographer Shaï Goldman’s sometimes frantic, dizzying frames suggesting even self loathing and aesthetic chaos no longer provides temporary relief. Breaking the fourth wall, Avinoam stokes the assumed disdain of the audience, but at least, according to him, Israel at least has something to show for itself through war and brute force. A human centipede formation of bootlicking degradation for the unnamed Russian billionaire seemingly seals Y’s descent to an artistic nether world, suggesting the end is literally near. Is resistance through complicity possible? YES. Maybe.

Reviewed on May 22nd at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival (78th edition) – Directors’ Fortnight. 150 Mins.

★★★★/☆☆☆☆☆