The Nadav Lapid effect, or the media rise of a deconstructed sabra

Yes by Nadav Lapid electrified Cannes and French critics. Hailed as both a political pamphlet and a cathartic confession, the film nevertheless raises a question: what exactly are we applauding in this work that is considered radical? Behind the cinematic object, it is the discourse of the media-savvy Israeli director—sometimes embracing the role of deconstructed sabra, sometimes that of prophet of doom or visionary poet—that fascinates French critics.

 

 

Radical, convulsive, feverish, impactful, exhausting, courageous, hyperactive, frenetic, cerebral, ferocious, sentimental, acidic, decadent, sick, nightmarish, intellectual, explosive, mystical, carnivalesque, dissonant, jarring, provocative… These words could appear in the dialogue of a Nadav Lapid film… In fact, they are just a small sample of the flood of adjectives contained in the various articles and interviews published about Yes, the Israeli director’s latest film, which was presented last May at the Cannes Film Festival as part of the Directors’ Fortnight. Before its release in French theaters on September 17th, it had already caused quite a stir—and sparked numerous comments (though fewer analyses)—and clearly inspired critics.

The fable is intended, says the author, to hold up a mirror to an Israeli society that is too easily content with an endless and immoral war. It is a grim journey, that of Y. and Jasmine, a couple of failed artists thirsty for money and recognition, parents of a young boy, who offer themselves body and soul to a morally abject Israeli economic elite at orgiastic parties. Their routine of debauchery is shattered by the horror of October 7th and the war in Gaza, until they are entrusted with composing a new national anthem glorifying war and destruction. Stubbornly deaf to the reality that rings in their ears, the histrions of Yes persist in their chimerical quest for a better future, to the point of absurdity and oblivion. The result is a film of extreme obscenity—a sequence of real images of Gaza under bombardment in the background of a love scene that flirts with the snuff movie—formatted in every way to please the European media.

Paradoxically, it is both as a paragon of opposition to Israeli policy and as a cathartic portrayal of the turmoil and trauma of post-October 7th Israeli society that Yes has been unanimously praised by French critics, confirming for some the director’s courage and political commitment; while for others, it revealed the “patriot” hitherto concealed by the “enfant terrible”.^[1].

At a time when Israel is the focus of global attention, what are we really applauding from our velvet seats in Cannes or Paris?

This unanimity—as well as the standing ovations that accompanied the film’s screenings at festivals and that we saw in Paris during the “Directors’ Fortnight”—and this frank consensus around a work described as radical and polemical raise questions. At a time when Israel is the focus of global attention, what are we really applauding from our velvet seats in Cannes or Paris? The man and his speeches? The film and its aesthetic qualities? What expectations—and desires—does Yes echo among this audience of connoisseurs, and how does it fit into its author’s body of work?

The journey of an ordinary Israeli

Maintaining an aesthetic style that is often pop, sometimes kitsch, even vulgar, from film to film, Nadav Lapid stands out for his profuse, even logorrheic, but highly “written” and deliberately literary dialogue. The filmmaker claims to be inspired by literature: the son of a screenwriter and an editor, he has written a collection of short stories^[2], and the poems that spring from the mouth of little Yoav in The Kindergarten Teacher (2014) are none other than the early work of little Nadav, abandoned when he encountered the injunction to sabra masculinity, which he embraced until his military service. The desire to go to war replaced that of writing poetry, and the young Tel Avivian dreamed of missions, combat, and joining the Golani Brigades. The project was cut short when he was found to be in poor health. So he joined the Intelligence Service, then, as a post-IDF cure, began a course of study in history and philosophy, and finally made his first long stay in Paris… Then, back in Israel, came years of training at the Sam Spiegel Film School and a career as a renowned director. So much for the storytelling, as told by its protagonist in interviews with the French and Israeli press from Policeman (2011) to Yes.

Having lived in Paris for several years, where he was working on a project about the death of art—quite a program…— the filmmaker says he returned to Tel Aviv after October 7th and immersed himself in the Zeitgeist he found there to write his new film, a hybrid work set between the before and after of Black Shabbat, between “the death of art and death itself,” as he puts it.^[3]

A Francophone and Francophile, an admirer of the filmmakers of the New Wave, he readily references Eustache’s La Maman et la Putain, a defining viewing experience, when introducing his Parisian screenings; however, it is Israel that he writes about, Israel that he films in and draws his fables from. It is therefore not surprising that his films are imbued with a distinctly Sabra iconography.

Paradoxes and roots

The tension between language, body, and land permeates all of Lapid’s films. It is in this coexistence of the filmmaker’s double characters, endowed with all the attributes of the contemporary sabra, and a cinematic style borrowed from the French New Wave—with highly written, highly constructed dialogues—that European viewers experience a sense of strangeness, a disconnect, which from our perspective is undoubtedly the most obviously “radical” aspect of his cinema in formal terms, and also the most autobiographical, since it echoes his own oscillation, his own tension between the cultural references of the two shores of the Mediterranean. However successful his works and political positions may be in France and Europe, he is steeped in Israeli culture, which fortunately is not limited to the chance encounter between the memory of Shoah, an Uzi, hummus, and falafels at the foot of the Kotel.

The heavy use of ingredients that make up a dramaturgy of shock, which has always been present in bursts throughout Lapid’s filmography, continues in Yes. These ingredients, whether purely formal—camera shaking in all directions, flashing lights, blurry images, troubled, swirling images, sound saturated to the point of unbearability—or whether they clash with moral sensibilities—transgressive scenes of humiliation, violence, brutal prostitution—or whether they reinforce the mental iconography of European viewers hesitating between Orientalism and decolonialism, – desert, military uniforms – with the notable exception of the highly questionable sequence inserting real images of the bombing of Gaza into the fiction, they stun the viewer more than they enlighten them.

The societal portrait that Lapid paints throughout his works is a literal representation of the contradictions and aporias that plague daily life between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Seen from the banks of the Seine, this seems so exotic, so symbolic and so out of step with our own reality that it demands to be commented on in the most complex terms possible—in other words, this tendency of critics to over-intellectualize Lapid’s cinema—does it not refer us back to the cliché, still alive and well in circles that proclaim themselves friends of the Jews and, by extension, of the Israelis, of an intellectuality consubstantial with the Jewish world?

The characters in Lapid’s films, hyper-gendered, unrestrained in their physicality, hedonistic, frantically swaying their hips to whatever trendy musical soup is playing, full of enthusiasm and devoid of snobbery because they are uneducated, sweating, licking their fingers when they eat, are nevertheless as real as can be, plucked from the streets or cafes of Tel Aviv.

The music videos, which until Yes were zany, kitschy interludes that didn’t fit with the narrative arc and stylistic approach of the films, don’t so much invite viewers to take a step back from the story and reflect, but rather to enjoy themselves and be entertained. This attachment to omnipresent pop music and taste for improbable choreography is reminiscent of Israeli society’s equally improbable craze for Eurovision, each edition of which transforms the streets of Tel Aviv into a joyful balagan.

In every interview Lapid points out his faults as an Israeli in order to be better absolved by his interlocutors and suggests that another Israel, transformed, redeemed by self-criticism, is possible. Here is the deconstructed sabra that every journalist would like to have at their table.

And then there is the weight and density of the words—modern Hebrew was designed to nourish and cement national identity and distinguish it from diasporic identities— the iteration, the reiteration of a phrase, the voicing of a manifesto, the recitation of a poem, the performative character conferred upon them, elevate utterance to profération, trivial exchange to ritual. Or the storytelling, the characters’ taste for and need to talk about themselves, to recount their day, their experiences of military service, their childhood memories, to recount what they have been told, this perpetual re-inscription in a story, in a narrative—is this not also a strong marker of Israeli culture—and more generally of Jewish culture?

Finally, the land, the desert, the Dead Sea, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean… these are the landscapes that the characters—the members of the unit in The Policeman (2011), Nira and little Yoav in The Kindergarten Teacher (2014), Lapid Y.’s filmmaker double and the Ministry of Culture envoy in Ahed’s Knee (2021), Lapid Y.’s street performer double in Yes…—contemplate with fervor, overwhelmed by the harsh light. Only Yoav, “exiled” to Paris in Synonyms (2019), and the anti-capitalist activists in Policeman, who, for different reasons and in different contexts, abhor, reject, and openly refute both their country (eretz) and the state (medinat), escape the pull of the earth (adama).

Disturbing is the symmetry between the characters’ love for their homeland and their parents, particularly their mothers, who become less and less embodied and more and more deified as the films progress—a confidante and nurturer in The Policeman: “How handsome you are!” she says to her son when he announces that he is about to become a father; a dying mother, once an accomplice and co-author in Ahed’s Knee, to whom Y. sends postcards filmed in the Arava desert throughout the film, where he is presenting their film; and finally, a mother-sky in Yes, Y.’s guide and conscience from the clouds, in the midst of the moral ruins of post-October 7th. If it weren’t autobiographical—the filmmaker lost his mother before she could finish editing Synonyms—we might see this as a series of allegories or metaphors in perfect harmony with traditional Zionist mythology.

The fact remains that Lapid is not insensitive to this mythology, which permeates his works, and that equating his virulent criticism of Israeli policy with anti-Zionism would be a gross error, as would describing his cinema as “European,” as has been the case in several publications. If, in Synonyms, he filmed Paris with this captivating gaze, with this airy lightness of camera movement and fluidity of editing, in stark contrast to the heaviness that characterizes his other films, it seems to us that this is by no means the spirit of the New Wave, but rather the cinematic translation of the enviable condition of the voluntary exile, detached from the responsibilities incumbent upon citizens who reside where they can exercise their rights but free to return, free to remain isolated from the noise of the world—at least his world—and able to dream a little.

 

Lapid and the Palestinian question: a misinterpretation

Nadav Lapid’s cinema is almost never metaphorical; it is stubbornly literal and less emancipated from Israeli nationalist grammar than we would like to see: when the activists in The Policeman practice shooting at a gnarled tree in the middle of the desert, it is a literal foreshadowing of the violent action that will follow, which aims to undermine Israel as an unequal capitalist entity. And when the character Shira reads to her comrades in arms the manifesto she is writing, in which she slips in that “the Palestinians, at least, are aware of being oppressed and occupied,” the leader of the group immediately interrupts her: “Why talk about the Palestinians?” Yes, why? The only Palestinian face in Lapid’s work is that of Ahed Tamimi in Ahed’s Knee, or rather, the image of her face, or rather, the images of the slap^[4]. The occupation is—obviously—evoked, and it is Bezalel Smotrich’s words that give the film its title. In Yes, finally, the sound of bombing and thick clouds of black smoke rise from the Gaza Strip. Palestinians are completely absent from Nadav Lapid’s cinema, which, in this respect, is deeply parochial, something he acknowledges when, invited to a round table organized by Médiapart^[5], he declares that he does not know “the other side” and can only talk about Israeli society, since it is “his country.”

The cinematic rendering of this violent attachment to a sick country is the essence of Yes. A first subject that was intended to be universal—the death of art—and which, struck by October 7th, found itself caught up in current events. This collision, its heaviness, its length, its bloatedness, all take precedence over the few flashes of brilliance that permeate this latest opus: the melancholic ballad of resignation whispered by Y. into his son’s ear as they walk along the seashore; the joyfully nostalgic four-handed piano playing of Y. and Leah.

Palestinians are completely absent from Nadav Lapid’s cinema, which, in this respect, is deeply parochial.

In many ways, the film is therefore a continuation of his previous works. We find the same attention to language, the same bodies, the same landscapes where the characters take refuge, the same symbiosis between man and the elements of nature, the same desire to articulate social criticism—but with an excessiveness, a vehemence, and a din that hinders the viewer’s attempts to distance themselves, leaving them caught up in an unpleasant, sometimes painful sensory immersion. In Ahed’s Knee, Y. stated: “It’s always geography that wins.” In Yes, the obscene coexistence of histrionic register and documentary imagery thwarts any prospect of victory or salvation: it is a fable without a moral, a potpourri of the worst. There also remains the impossibility of representing the Other other than as the mass grave suggested by the long sequence showing and hearing Gaza under bombardment.

Media plasticity and fluid discourse

The massacres of October 7th and the wave of violence in Gaza, which continues unabated as I write these lines, have profoundly and lastingly altered, damaged, and divided Israeli society and the diaspora, and deteriorated their relations with the rest of the world.

The possible classification of the crimes committed by the Israeli army in Gaza as genocide by the ICC brutally confronts Jewish communities with the unthinkable—finding themselves on the side of the executioner— and the Israeli government’s policy is erasing, a little more each day, the prospect of a harmonious and peaceful future for Palestinians and Israelis, tearing apart the reference points of the Israeli Zionist left, the diaspora, and the universalist non-Jewish left.

It is undoubtedly to this chaos, this loss of bearings, that the Nadav Lapid phenomenon responds: he who, in every interview, points out his faults as an Israeli in order to be better absolved by his interlocutors and suggests that another Israel, transformed, redeemed by self-criticism, is possible. His endorsement by Amos Gitaï^[6] as his successor reinforces his legitimacy and respectability: here is the deconstructed sabra that every journalist would like to have at their table.

Unanimity, of course, has its limits: until now spared by PACBI^[7], he will no longer escape boycott—not for the content of his work, but for the way it is financed. In this context of new hostility, from which Lapid undoubtedly thought he could protect himself by aligning himself with a certain French far left whose anti-Zionist positions have too often been expressed in more than dubious terms and which has not hesitated to use the Palestinian cause for electoral purposes, one may wonder whether the recent emergence of Jewish mysticism in his discourse^[8] – Lapid proclaims himself a prophet of doom through whom the world in ruins speaks, a touch of exoticism that will not leave Judeophile goyim indifferent — which goes hand in hand with the use of the pronoun “we” to refer to the Jewish community, is not the expression of a final reversal, an attempt to ultimately be perceived as more Jewish than Israeli, and thus be able to protect himself from an obviously antisemitic boycott.

The contemporary world’s ability to absorb and immediately turn any subject into a news story is not unrelated to the morally questionable enthusiasm that Yes has generated in the media. It is true that Israel is not just any subject. Lapid has been sought after more often for his political or sociological expertise than for his cinematographic skills, especially since he plays well to the media, knowing how to deliver in often abrupt and shocking terms what makes for a headline-grabbing article: for example, he states that he “shot the film as if in an enemy country”^[9] and expresses all the horror he feels at the policies of the Israeli government and society, which contributed to the financing of his film via the Israel Film Fund—could there be such a thing as purity of the camera, just as there is purity of arms?

His extraordinary rhetorical plasticity is seductive, and his propensity to adopt an elegiac tone and the appropriate lexicon to discourse on his exile and on the cowardice of those who would not have the courage to program his film—in Cannes, to criticize Israel; in Jerusalem, to criticize Cannes—is moving. This is a stance – never questioning one’s own project but constantly blaming the world around us for hindering its smooth running – which shows that deconstruction is far from over.

That the terms “feat,” “virtuoso,” and “enjoyable” can be used to describe a film that includes an entire sequence of documentary images filmed in real time of Gaza being bombarded by the Israeli army, and that the director is asked about his feelings his thoughts at the time of filming, illustrates the ethical breakdown of our contemporary society, affected by decades of television voyeurism and the inherent difficulty of distinguishing between the world of images and images of the world.

The extent of the destruction and suffering inflicted on Gaza, its apocalyptic nature, exceeds our capacity for mental and cinematic representation, especially that of an Israeli. The detachment of images from reality, although morally questionable and undoubtedly profane, is not only Nadav Lapid’s dubious response to the contemporary injunction to engage with current events, it also echoes the literalness that permeates all cinema. It undoubtedly also heralds a new era in Israeli cinema^[10], whose previous paradigms, now dismantled and defeated, must be reinvented.

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Laure Abramovici