Movie Review: a Gut-Punch Called “Yes”
I’m hardly ever surprised by Israeli self-criticism or the reaction it evokes from the nationalist Right. I read Ha’aretz, Israel’s newspaper of record and the most fearsome critic of the current regime. It almost never pulls its political punches, with the result that it is regularly the subject of rage. If Itamar Ben Gvir or any of his cronies could ravage press freedom in the State of Israel, I’m certain they would begin with Ha’aretz. It makes liberal rabbis like me look like pikers—pussycats crippled by dutiful self-censorship.
Ariel Bronz as Yud in “Yes”
I never thought that any critic could be harsher, until I encountered Nadav Lapid. He is the writer/director of a new movie called “Yes,” recently screened in the Synagogue’s film program. The storyline focuses on a protagonist called Yud, a kind of Israeli Everyman in abject freefall. The script plays with the idea of the so-called Pintele Yid, an ineffable spark that is supposed to live in each Jew and cannot be extinguished by oppression or self- abasement. Yid and Yud are essentially indistinguishable.
The problem here is that, from the opening scene forward, Yud’s spark is already barely flickering. He is a failed comic without steady employment, reduced to playing the jester at events. He clowns without wit in sparkly costumes, but there is nothing sparkly about his lame performances. Everything about him is a protracted grimace, the Israeli version of professional cringe. And he operates in a world of perverse debasement. His clients gather on the shore of the Mediterranean to drink and carouse while Gaza dies, pummeled into dust by the Israeli military. Meanwhile rabbis dance with shimmying hookers and everyone looks like Sara Netanyahu: bloated and bleached to the point of surreal exaggeration.
To his credit, Yud knows that he is done for. With his dead mother’s moral voice in his ears, he has placed himself in a position of self-remove. But despite the loyalty of his mysterious girlfriend and the gravitational pull of the son they share, he submits to the demands of a Russian Jewish oligarch who hires him to write a new Jewish anthem, one that glorifies a violent ethno-nationalist state. It prompts a crisis of conscience, moral and artistic, but he writes it anyways in an orgy of self-hatred. Just when you think it cannot get worse, he submits to the strange sexual force of the oligarch. In the final scenes, he sucks the rich man’s heel, prostituted by a power he cannot resist. The question is whether he can be saved at all. The girlfriend pulls him from oncoming traffic, but their fate is finally and utterly unknowable.
What I do know is that I have never seen anything like this. Lapid is part of a cadre of filmmakers who refuse to look away. Abraham and Szor, writer/directors of “NAZA,” are others just like him on the current scene. He knows all about Gaza and the depravity of Hamas, reciting its sins through Yud’s childhood friend, Leah. But he sees Israel’s conduct with the same fierce honesty.
The question here is whether there is atonement in this strategy, if “Yes” is enough to right the moral balance by acknowledging what has happened to the soul of the country. Ultimately Lapid doesn’t seem to be interested. What matters more is simply documenting the debasement.
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No robots were involved in the writing of this entry.