Yes · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The camera can't hold still. In the opening movement of Yes, it gyrates through a bacchanal of Israel's monied elite like — a critic's phrase, too good to improve — a drunken dancer on the verge of throwing up. Techno pounds "that will blast your brains out." Israeli flags hang in every frame, seeded through the rooms by production designer Pascale Consigny until the national symbol becomes wallpaper. And in the middle of it, Y., a jazz pianist, and Yasmin, a dancer, have made a decision that organizes everything after: to say yes. To everything. To every buyer of their bodies and their art.

Start with the yes, because Deleuze has an exact name for what it does to a person. He called it the impulse-image — not action (a hero changing a situation), not yet pure contemplation, but the image of an appetite, a compulsion, a body pulled down a slope. Deleuze located it in naturalism, in Stroheim and Buñuel: worlds where beneath the polite social surface raw drives erupt. Y.'s "yes" isn't a choice repeated; it's a drive that eats choice. Each assent lowers him. Deleuze called that trajectory the line of slope — an irreversible descent toward exhaustion, degradation, a kind of death. The film's very shape is that slope: chaptered, picaresque, moving from hedonistic excess through the introspective passage titled "The Route." Nothing is resolved by action, because the mode isn't action. It's descent.

And the world he descends into isn't merely a setting. Deleuze distinguished the derived milieu — the concrete, recognizable place — from the originary world it turns out to be the crust of: a savage zone of pure drives, older than any society. Lapid stages post–October 7 Israel exactly this way. The elite's parties, the sexual transactions, the hunger for triumph — the film treats the whole social order as the visible skin of something carnivorous underneath. The flags aren't decoration. They're the surface over the drive.

Then the commission. A Russian-oligarch patron (Aleksei Serebryakov, imported from Leviathan with all its state-power menace) hires Y. to compose the music for a new, vengeful national anthem. Here the film's second great concept arrives — what Deleuze called the powers of the false, and its human figure, the forger. Cinema once rested on a contract: the image doesn't lie, what you see is true. The forger breaks it. He's the artist who fabricates truth, who turns the false into a creative power, who shifts identity to become whatever is demanded. Y. is a forger in the plainest sense — paid to manufacture a feeling a nation will sing as though it were spontaneous. His real instrument, jazz (Omer Klein's idiom scored against the demand for a martial hymn), is improvised and unownable; the job is to conscript it into a lie in march time. The tragedy isn't that he fails. It's that he can succeed.

Watch his body while he does it. The late Deleuze turned from what characters do to how they hold themselves — the gest, a posture that exposes a social relation the way a stage exposes an actor. Lapid stages bodies in extremis: dance on demand, sex as transaction, performance-on-command. Every "yes" is carried by a body bending into the shape power requires. Yasmin the dancer, Y. the pianist — their trained artistry becomes the medium of their servility. You read the politics off the posture.

The architecture is old and specific. From Godard's Weekend Lapid takes the picaresque road-descent through a rotten society, the intertitle chapters, jazz as rupture, the long take as a political weapon. From Pasolini's Salò he takes the coldest lesson — the body catalogued as commodity across chaptered circles, the grotesque turned against power. And from his own films: Synonyms gave him this convulsive, body-chasing handheld (Shaï Goldman returns behind the camera); Ahed's Knee gave him the artist-protagonist as a vehicle for rage aimed at once at Israel and at himself; The Kindergarten Teacher first asked what happens when art is appropriated. Yes literalizes all of it — complicity is now a signed contract.

The anthem is where the film touches Deleuze's political cinema most precisely. Modern political film, he argued, no longer speaks for a people present and unified; it works through the fact that the people are missing — that "a people" is something yet to be invented, or forged. An anthem is the forgery of a people: it summons a "we" that doesn't yet exist and demands you sing as if it always had. Y.'s job is to fabricate that "we" in the immediate wake of atrocity.

Then the film stops moving. Against all the vertigo, one sustained shot: a character recites the atrocities of October 7 while overlooking a Gaza wreathed in smoke and fire. The dervish camera goes still. This is the rhythm that lifts Yes above satire — the oscillation between convulsion and unbearable held duration, between the body that says yes to everything and the eye that, for one long take, can only look.

What did it do? It is among the first fiction features to face the post–October 7 moment head-on, and it does so by refusing the two easy exits, pure irony and pure lament. It uses Deleuze's slope and Deleuze's forger not as ornament but as structure — a film about the manufacture of national feeling that makes its own form feel manufactured, obscene, and alive. You leave with a question Lapid won't close: when the anthem is beautiful, were you moved, or forged?