... you can learn from:
Synonyms (2019)
Yoav: I moved to France to flee Israel. Flee a state that is nasty, obscene, ignorant, idiotic, sordid, fetid, crude, abominable, odious, lamentable, repugnant,
detestable, mean-spirited, mean-hearted...
Emile: No country is all that at once.
Today is the 51st birthday of the rightfully outraged Israeli ex-pat filmmaker
Nadav Lapid, who's weaponized his filmmaking to dissect the horrors of his homeland making one furious masterpiece after another. This includes the brilliant film above as well as 2014's
The Kindergarten Teacher, 2021's
Ahed's Knee, and the just-recently-released here in the U.S. film
Yes. And speaking of
Yes I am rather furious at myself for not reviewing that movie because I found it a total stunner, so let's throw down some words about it since the ocassion's presented itself. (I already shared the trailer
right here.)
Yes tells the story of Y (Ariel Bronz) and his wife Yasmin (Efrat Dor) as they party the pain away in Tel Aviv, turning their radios up so they can drown out the sounds of the bombs dropping onto Gaza. He's a musician, she's a dance-instructor, and the two of them routinely hand off their baby son (pointedly named Noah) so they can humiliate themselves every night for the grotesque powers-that-be in order to sustain a living. Lapid gives the Israeli elite the full Beckmann & Dix treament, rendering them hideous to the point where they're literally bending over and waving their assholes in our face. It ain't sublte, nor should it be.
Since the pair are gorgeous and entertaining and simply good at what they do (i.e. debasing themselves with extreme vigor) Y & Yasmin move pretty easily up the social ladder, until Y finds himself charged with writing a new national anthem for Israel in the wake of the October 7th attacks. For there he's shot through the cannon of a dark night of the soul as he tries to come to terms with his role as propogandist for genocide, but Lapid spares no one his visciousness; everyone is to blame for keeping the broken system afloat. Yes is brutal, brilliant, a ballistic missle shot straight at our insidious self-preservation in the face of so much unspeakable. Its farce is tragedy, all too familiar. All the punchlines are a horror; our laughter curdled, indistinguishable from screams. How au current, if you will.