Like any sane person witnessing what’s happening right now in Israel and Palestine, filmmaker Nadav Lapid couldn’t help but go mad. So he returned to his homeland – that mind-boggling dilemma – and made an impossible film. Screened only in one of Cannes’ parallel sections, “Yes” is a fireball that jolts us out of the haze of this sluggish edition, only to leave us, inevitably, in doubt and despair.

Yes follows an Israeli artist couple, Y. (Ariel Bronz) and Yasmin (Efrat Dor), who revel in outrageous acts at elite parties. In the very first scene, we see them kissing passionately, then launching into a jerky, frenetic dance to Be My Lover, under strobe lights, with a manic camera chasing after them. This bravura opening sets the tone: the film bursts out in an explosion of vulgar, carnal, liberated energy that it only starts to lose around the halfway mark. But while it lasts (a kind of prologue that plays more like a concentrated anthology of despair-meets-clarity), Yes is a phenomenal work that transmutes surrounding delirium into audiovisual delirium: pounding beats, bodies colliding, grinding, thrashing, screams, a fractured, jittery edit. It’s all there to drown out reality in noise, intensity, and darkness. In Lapid’s vision, Israel is an extreme experience. Living in this country means, quite literally, smashing your head against the world.

Y., this jester who says “Yes” to whomever pays most, becomes the lightning rod for this existential condition – a trauma constantly rewritten. In a way, he’s our guide, though he too has no idea where he’s going. In the opening scene, he writhes, foams at the mouth, locks eyes – giving deadpan stares – with the military brass in attendance, dunks his head in punch and molten chocolate, ending up smeared like a 1960s actionist. (Aside from Radu Jude, no one has come closer to the messy-liminal spirit of Dušan Makavejev’s films.) Just a few minutes in, the film renders irrelevant most of what we’ve seen lately (if not in recent years): it’s shameless, grotesque, and irresistibly sexy in the intelligence with which it pulverises current events. It also gives us a disarming sequence of erotic abandon: Can love survive in the time of genocide?

The night ends with Y. and Yasmin nibbling – one on each side – the ears of a matron who lives in a kitsch palazzo. (Y. is a sort of antihero who licks – literally and figuratively – anything in reach.) The next morning kicks off in hangover haze, with “Aserejé” blaring from speakers while Y. and Yasmin, now back in their tiny hovel, prance and pose around their baby. This second party hit makes it clear: Yes is not going to do things in moderation. Its deliberately bad taste, fused with genuine punk fervour, turns the film into a kind of sublime cacophony, rhythmically anarchic. Using deranged images from Tel Aviv – from enormous flags flying over the city to yacht parties where guests debate the atrocities committed by fellow Israelis – the film follows Y., equally hallucinated and inept, into the heart of this island of darkness that resembles a society in its terminal stage.

Just before the screening, I’d found myself lamenting the disappearance of the burlesque gesture from cinema – of everything that risks seeming too much, of revelatory stupidity. Little did I know Yes would deliver in spades. Crashing his bike into a wall, gaping at trees in parks, teaching his toddler to embrace resignation, sucking the fingers of men in suits – Y. is a kind of Israeli Jerry Lewis: a radical comic for whom dumb laughter conceals an unfaceable truth. As he rediscovers his own country without assuming a clear position, Y. becomes a contrast agent: his clowning exposes not only the absurdity of the present but the raw pain – felt on his bruised, battered body – of taking part in it. Drawing on classic sketch comedy (he even slips on a banana peel), Lapid reinvents the disruptive power of the gag, far closer here to politicised avant-garde than to any abstract formalism. Y. becomes a living force conjuring terror, a fool who dives smiling into the muck of the world – and makes that muck suddenly transparent.

Yes invents a full-blown Dadaist figure who spits out rubber balls as he grapples with one of the greatest calamities since the Holocaust: it had to be dared. The film’s first act is remarkable not just for its invention but for its risk-taking. To paraphrase a famous line: Is comedy still possible after Gaza? But then again, the film also asks: Is anything else possible?

Lapid attempts an answer in parts two and three, where Y. is commissioned to compose the music for a new triumphalist Israeli anthem – a real, downright abject hymn, reproduced verbatim here – and where his artistic and romantic life spirals even further. From gleefully embracing the role of human trash – playing the submissive lapdog at political soirées in a desperate bid to preserve the illusion of a normal life must be, in a sense, a form of involuntary protest – Y. becomes institutionalised trash, enlisted into a campaign meant to glorify a criminal state. At this point, the film loses some of its delirious majesty and steps into responsibility: it sends Y. on a journey along the separation wall to a resort where he reconnects with a former lover now working for a government propaganda office. Her monologue, an unstoppable torrent of hollowed-out words about the atrocities committed by Hamas, is undercut by images of decimated Gaza, where black smoke rises into the sky – the film’s most powerful moment. It would be sheer lunacy if it weren’t first and foremost an incomprehensible, tangible tragedy.

However little I may have cared for the protagonist’s romantic woes, I have to credit Lapid for taking Godard’s advice seriously: put everything in. Desire, romance, politics, war, madness, and the rush of contradictory emotions that leaves you reeling. In that first scene, Lapid already juxtaposed Y.’s mindless routine with news flashes about the Israeli army’s rampage – a cinematic method for showing how war erupts inside a life doomed to daily cognitive dissonance. In its second half, the joke can no longer shield against devastation.

Toward the end, the narrative shifts again. Lapid inserts actual propaganda clips used to promote the anthem in 2023–2024 – children singing vile lyrics, as generic images of IDF operations play in the background. He then cuts to his own footage: other children, dressed in white, revealing the hi-tech panorama of a city that looks unbearably Western, where life seems to go on undisturbed, anonymous. I’ve rarely felt this kind of stomach-churning incandescence outside a handful of recent Russian films – among them Petrov’s Flu (2021), Kirill Serebrennikov’s fever dream that eerily foresaw the current degeneration of Putin’s Russia. Hysterical and barely held together between opening and closing credits, Yes deepens the neurosis already present in Lapid’s earlier Ahed’s Knee (2021). It’s made of the same problematic material: war gives it urgency, an expressionist fervour (early on, we glimpse a George Grosz canvas foreshadowing Nazism), an unshakable subject. 

Yes may not be perfect, but its imperfections make it feel alive and unsettlingly funny, which can’t be said for many films this year. The fact that it sometimes misses the right tone or lapses into sentimentality, and at other times lands a searing blow, only proves the filmmaker’s genuine struggle with his formless subject matter – a reality too vast and too impossible to narrate. Lapid is one of today’s great directors. His ability to combine agit-prop with corporeality, in-your-face abrasiveness with poetry, makes him singular. His film, clearly, won’t solve anything – and in its retreat into the figure of an artist consumed by personal melodramas, it risks veering into self-pity. But in its chaotic arc, it feels like a torch. In its furious sprawl, Yes illuminates everything.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.