QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM KARLOVY VARY

The latest creation of 56-year-old Nadav Lapiv is a scathing satire of his native Israel. In the wake of the October 7 attack, struggling jazz musician Y (Ariel Bronz) receives an offer seemingly too good to refuse. Bizarre PR agent Avinoam asks him to compose a new national anthem for Israel. The effort is funded by a Russian billionaire (Aleksei Serebryakov). The stint would end Y’s financial worries, while turning him into a national icon. Unfolding in three acts, Yes charts both the protagonist’s collapse and the moral unraveling of a nation

Y has his ethical qualms, but these are promptly extinguished by the pecuniary prospects: No more of the vulgar cabaret acts he and his dancer wife Yasmine (Efrat Dor) perform for the Israeli elite. So he says “yes” to the devilish deal, which predictably becomes a moral slippery slope. Y quickly submits to the seductive choreography of power. With each symbolic gesture – dyeing his hair blond, costuming himself in ever more flamboyant theatrical garb – he stages his own ideological capitulation. The national anthem he composes emerges as an operatic manifesto of exclusion, imbued with fascist aesthetic and jingoism.

Harrowing sound elements – loud phone alerts, screams, explosions, news announcements – puncture the moral degradation of the couple. These violent disruptions remind viewers of the war-ravaged reality looming just 70km away (the distance between Tel Aviv, where the film takes place, and Gaza). The film is cut with surgical sense of irony. Over-lit spaces pulsate with theatrical artifice. Characters lurch through rigid tableaux, choreographed like state-sanctioned puppets in squeaky clean and soulless settings. Colours clash or vanish, reflecting a world where performance and repetition erode meaning and substance. The aesthetic is not decoration but an overemphasized indictment: a cinematic world that exposes its own manipulation to mirror the very same process.

Lapid dissects Y’s transformation with self-serving smugness. This partly compromises the film director’s criticism of the use of art of art for nationalistic purposes. Instead of confronting the numbing pressures of economic hardship, Lapid ridicules them. Poverty looks almost absurdist. The protagonist’s choice between precarious autonomy and corrupted complicity is oversimplified. The lack of any existential threat robs Y of psychological ambivalence. His highly symbolic dilemma does not possess ethical nuances. The attempt to confront the collective trauma haunting the Israeli psyche comes across as heavy handed.

The strength of the film lies in exposing the dirty tactics of propaganda with furious allegories, and highlighting how state-sanctioned violence can creep into the fabric of culture. The film title becomes a grim chorus. Each head nod marks the further destruction of Israeli ethics and conscience.

Yes shows in the 59th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. The Israeli director is no stranger to the topic of nationalism: he won the Golden Bear in 2019 with the seemingly acerbic Synonyms.