Yes · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

What *Yes* stages, with a ferocity rare even for Nadav Lapid, is the impulse-image — Deleuze's term for cinema that strips the veneer of civilization to expose the raw drives underneath: sex, money, survival, the herd instinct of nationalism. Y. and Yasmin's vow of total assent isn't a moral experiment that goes wrong; it reveals the "originary world" that was always there, dressed in the clothes of culture. The passage of bacchanalian excess performed for Israel's monied and military elite makes this visceral: the body, once a vessel of jazz or dance, becomes simply transactional matter in the service of power. Out of this impulse-image rises the film's most damning figure — the artist as forger — which is the province of the powers of the false. When Y. accepts the commission to compose a national anthem for a Russian oligarch's revenge fantasy, Lapid literalizes what the concept describes: narration that abandons the true, beauty weaponized as lie. The anthem isn't a song; it's a confession of complicity, and the film refuses to soften it with consolation or a conventional arc. The instrument of all this is Shaï Goldman's camera — the same destabilizing handheld grammar first refined in *Synonyms* (2019), where Lapid first deployed it as both witness and indictment of the Israeli state's demand for assent. Here the lens has been described as "a drunken dancer on the verge of throwing up," its deliberate vertigo refusing the moral composure that would let any image settle into safety. The auteur's signature is also the film's ethical argument: nothing holds still; nothing is innocent; "yes" is the most dangerous word.