Bootlicker Blues

Yes (2025) - Lapid As the bombs are falling in Tehran by US/Israeli military, which, by all indication, seems like another Middle Eastern conflict that won't end well- if it ends at all, comes Nadav Lapid's searing satire about an artist sucking up to a militaristic, patriotic fervor of a nation, in order to have a good life, even if it means leaving his conscience at the door. Just like his previous two films, Synonyms and Ahed's Knee, Yes is a semi-biographical and unapologetically angry film.

The film's frenetic, energetic first half is all about debauchery - endless drug and booze fueled dance parties for the rich and the powerful, set to EDM. Y (Ariel Bronz), a pianist and his dancer wife Yasmin (Efrat Dor) are there to entertain them with sexy dance moves and crazy antics. They make no bones about their depravity and humiliation in the hands of these people who rule the State of Israel.

In one scene at the pool party, Y goes on a bender, drowns and gets revived for their entertainment. Another, Y and Yasmin tongue fuck an old rich lady in her ear until she comes. They go home to their small Tel Aviv apartment to tend to their toddler son, after a depraved party after another. But they can't escape from daily news reports on their phones of bombs and destruction in Gaza, even while walking through the beautiful, pristine beaches of Tel Aviv as a backdrop - people are jogging and laughing and colorful paragliders jigjagging the bright blue skies.

In light of the October 7th, Y is tasked to compose a new national anthem to stir up the patriotic sentiment of the nation. This will be his and his family's ticket out. But where could they go?

The energetic tempo of the first half gives into a screeching halt as Y dyes his hair blonde and sneaks out to the desert for "inspiration" to compose his assignment. There he meets his ex-flame, Leah (Naama Preis), now begrudgingly in charge of running the IDF social media team. Their disdain of what's going on is mutual. They share their war time anecdotes from their parents' generation in WWII - "how could they go on living while atrocities are committed?", of course their parents were talking about old Europe during genocide of the Jewish people. The irony is not lost on Y and Leah as they watch smoke billowing over Gaza from a hill near the border. In a long monologue, Leah recites the atrocities committed by Hamas on Oct. 7th. Yes, what happened that day is horrifying. But everything the Netanyahu government did afterwards made everyone in the world hate them. 'Where could we go? Everybody hates us.' They conclude.

Conceived before the October 7th Massacre in 2023, and revised continuously throughout until the release at Cannes in 2025, Yes is a loud satire that reflects the uncomfortable present that the artistic community find themselves in a rock and a hard place, in an increasingly military fascist state.

The cringey inducing literal circle-jerk bootlicking scene might be too abrasive and over the top, the satire of Yes is way too close to home to be funny. Y and Yasmin know it too. It's written in their agonizing faces and actions, fully acknowledging their cowardice and pain of others, while trying to escape their predicament by turning blind eye to what's going on around them. It's an obnoxiously pointy and honest, yet sad film.

Yes opens 3/27 in New York and 4/3 in Los Angeles with national rollout to follow.

Censorship

Ahed's Knee (2021) - Lapid Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid's previous film, Synonyms examined national identity abroad in the background of the country's overly nationalistic and militaristic tendencies in the eyes of a young man. It was a stinging rebuke of über militarism that he grew up with and rejected. Lapid told me that in order to get a funding from the Ministry of Culture, he had to pitch it like it's a patriotic film about PTSD. And just like Synonyms, Ahed's Knee is a blunt film that doesn't shy away from criticizing the ministry's propagandistic tendencies, but it goes further and makes it the subject and confronts it head on. The title refers to the 2017 incident which went viral on the web where Ahed Tamimi, a young Palestinian girl who is shown slapping Israeli soldiers during a demonstration against the expansion of Israeli settlement in her hometown of Nabi Salih in the West Bank. A high ranking Israeli government official had said that the soldiers should've shot her knee cap off to shut her up.

Ahed's Knee concerns an aging filmmaker Y (Avshalom Pollak) casting for a project about Tamimi in Tel Aviv. He flies to a small desert town to show his previous film, arranged by a deputy director of the local library, Yahalom (Nur Fibak). She is young, well educated, ambitious liberal who seems to understand controversial artists like Y. But she is still an employee of the ministry which censors anything that is slightly critical of its government. There is a questionaire that Y has to fill out to get paid, Yahalom informs Y.

Lapid, again, draws it from his own experience. Ahed's Knee is just as autobiographical as Synonyms. Unsmiling, cynical Y who wants to expose the "ugliest, racist government" and its apatheid state is obviously drawn from himself. Y is also is a master storyteller. He breathlessly tells his experience as a young soldier stationed in Lebanon during the Israeli Occupation in the 80s to Yahalom in the desert against the setting sun, exposing lies their superiors tell to motivate young impressionable soldiers. With flashy visuals and constantly moving handheld cameras, Ahed's Knee has the same manic energy as Synonyms.

It culminates to Y making Yahalom admitting that there is strong censorship within the art community in Israel, and deep down she knows it is wrong. Ahed's Knee directly confronts the well-intentioned liberals and criticises for their sheepishness and passivity. It's an angry film and shows its director's resourcefulness in saying what he has to say in the strongest terms (in the guise of making a fiction) while getting away from the grips of the censors while making a film within the country.

Unflinching and direct in its message with kinetic visuals and breathless pacing, Ahed's Knee is another strong film from a talented filmmaker with strong point of view.

Interview: Nadav Lapid on Synonyms

Synonyms, Nadav Lapid's semi-autobiographical film about a young Israeli man struggling with his country's identity, won him many accolades this year, including the Golden Bear at the Berlinale. The film is greatly aided by its fearless star Tom Mercier. I had a chance to sit down with Lapid when he was in town for the New York Film Festival.

It opens this weekend in selected cities in the US. Please click here for my review of the film.

I know that your films are somewhat autobiographical. How close was the experience for you with SYNONYMS, as your main character Yael was going through in Paris?

It was pretty close. I mean, myself, I’ve done military service and a year later, I felt…in a very sudden way had a courage to leave, to runaway and never come back. It was the same determination, the same passion. And I landed in Paris and few days later…it’s very few words in French but…with not concrete plans for the future except for this…existential crisis, to die as an Israeli and reborn as a French.

I was mumbling words in adjectives and synonyms in French walking on the sidewalk you know.

Did you have a little French-Hebrew dictionary like in the movie?

Yeah yeah yeah totally! I still have it in somewhere in my pocket. (Laughs.)

Most of the scenes that takes place afterwards, I feel it’s like the real life and a movie, like me and Tom. I guess Tom is a little bit better version of myself. So I guess the movie is a better version of a real life in a sense.

You know that there is a moment in your life that looks like a genesis of a wonderful scene and then you go somewhere else or fall asleep…I don’t know. But in a movie, you can go back to these moments and, sometimes it’s opposite and sometimes it’s too evident (to the real life), so you can blur it a bit. So I think that’s the main difference.

Tom Macier is really phenomenal in this film. I hear there is a funny story behind his casting. Can you tell me about it?

I can tell you about the casting but you can decide it’s a funny story or not.

OK.

I mean, we found him in an ordinary casting but, only ordinary thing about it was the guy was like a youth judo champion. He was supposed to bring in the gold medal but the pressure and people’s expectations were too much, he abandoned judo to become a dancer. You can tell in his performance that fragility and tenderness and also violence.

Yeah.

Having him on set is like a casting a super hero, because he is capable of doing anything, I mean, physically and intellectually he can do everything. He can walk on his hands on Saint Germaine Boulevard while talking synonyms to the word 'clock'. I mean, it’s almost dangerous to have a person like this on set because whatever you are asking on set will be done.

But I realized and accept the fact that that’s how he functions. He does these things in a very calm and concentrated way. He is very serious.

And our casting director asked him to charm us because that was what was required of the character. I thought to myself, ‘oh man what’s the poor guy going to do?’ He was hesitating for a second. Then he went and found this life size cut out of a woman from behind the curtain. He started to hum and sing to her…some Edith Piaf song. He was this charged with this funny charming erotic cabaret thing.

They were rolling on the floor. It was pretty unbelievable. It was intense! He had so much imagination and inventive power. So we said. Wow that was great. And the moment we said that, he walks away and was being his serious self again. So that’s Tom. He can go from calm to racing from zero to three hundred in a second. He does that in the movie.

Oh definitely!

He can be polite and everything but he can also explode in a second.

I sat through the credit and it was backed by Israeli Ministry of Culture and Sport. But the movie itself doesn’t portray a flattering picture of Israeli military…

To say the least…

To say the least. How did it come about? How did you get a funding from them for this film?

First of all, I got the funding in 2017. I’m not so sure I would’ve gotten it today. It was slightly different. But even then, before there was kind of pitch you had to do. So before that, someone who knows me quite well, who was a director of one of those ancient film funds, called me and told me that when you do a pitch, try to make it sound a bit more patriotic. (Smiles devilishly.)

I mean, this is something that never happened to me before. But he told me, “Maybe present the movie as a story of a guy who had a post-traumatic stress disorder as a soldier with this PTSD symptoms, went to France but in the end finds out that there is no place like home, or something like that." It's true, you CAN talk about the movie like this!

There have been political movies made in Israel. And lately some of them are harshly criticized. For instance, a movie about a soldier at a checkpoint. But for the Ministry of Culture and other organizations around them, it is easier for them to deny those films’ argument and accuse them of falsehood.

But I think Synonyms goes much beyond. It talks about Israeli collective soul, Israel’s DNA, the essence of the Israeli state. This goes much beyond it becomes almost abstract. It’s not a left wing movie. At the same time, I think the movie is much more ambivalent. At the end, Yoav is as harsh to his French friends as he is to Israel.

I always feel that…when people ask me if the film is anti-Israel, I say that the main character who is desired, sensual, sexy, loved by the camera is an Israeli. An Israeli can’t be totally anti-Israel. All the contradictions exist in Yoav.

Before the premiere of the movie, one of the high officers of the Ministry of Culture who came, told me “I can’t wait to see if that movie is pro or anti Iarael.” I told him OK, the moment you find out, please tell me because I don’t know. In a way I was sincere. They don’t know how to deal with it.

I also saw Maren Ade as a executive producer and SBS Production on the credit too. How did that happen? Did you know these people previously?

No, no. But Komplizen Film and Maren Ade, they really loved my previous films and wrote to me often. I felt we had the same views in life. For Said Ben Said (SBS), I didn’t know him before. But I am pretty close to one of the most important figures in French cinema, Olivier Père. And Said was there too when I pitch the project.

But the film was not the easiest one to produce because many people didn’t like the script at all. My previous films were well received in France and they were excited about me coming to France to shoot it. But soon they read the script, they were disappointed.

I mean a lot of people loved it but I think it happens quite often with my script. The script itself is about 1/3 of the movie so when they read it they often feel it’s incomplete. It has beginning, middle and end but they feel it is incomplete.

Just like your previous film, KINDERGARTEN TEACHER.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Shai Goldman, who HAS shot all your films, does an amazing job in this film. It’s so kinetic in the beginning, How did you accomplish all the POV shots of Yoav walking in the sidewalk?

I held the camera when we were shooting on the street. We shot it on a smaller camera, usually with only me and my actors. Sometimes Shai was there as well. I think it really injected an extremely important thing to the movie. This vibration into a normal life. Whenever he is not doing something he is walking. The way he walks, it tells us about his state of mind.

It was fantastic. The film is so energetic.

The flashback sequences when Yoav is in the military. He wins the silver medal. Did it really happen to you?

(Uncomfortable laugh) Yeah…. My mother started clapping and that put me to shame.

We talked about this before but it’s not only the film makes fun of Israel’s uber military culture but there is this perverted French photographer. Is this how you view the French: perverted and uncaring to the foreigners who are coming and living in French society?

Well, you know for Yoav’s character, earthly paradise is obviously France. So however grossly caricatured they are, the better.

That’s why Yoav wakes up naked in front of the Frenchest French couple. It’s in the place he chooses to go -- the most archetypal places in Paris: Notre Dame and the bridge over Seine. There is always this distant curiosity the French people have for other nations and of course they are all somehow inferior.

I find that interesting about Yoav’s friend, who is super macho and yelling at the people in the subway and they don’t really give a shit. It goes perfectly well with what you are saying.

Yeah, exactly.

Identity Crisis

Synonyms (2019) - Lapid

Yoav (Tom Mercier), a young Israeli man, is first seen with spitting out words and their synonyms, like a broken automated dictionary, in French which is obviously not his native tongue. He arrives in a posh part of Paris, gets all of his meager belongings stolen in a flash, including clothes and a sleeping bag that he just laid out on the floor, in a large empty apartment. And there is no hot water. He passes out from exhaustion and hypothermia. His young neighbors, Emile (Quentin Dolmaire of Anaud Desplechin's My Golden Days) and Caroline (Louise Chevillote), find him and revive him. They are almost parody of what 'a Parisian couple' is like - Emile is a writer who is forever working on a book titled, "Night of Inertia" and sexually ambiguous, coquettish Caroline plays oboe in an orchestra in her spare time. Emile, fascinated by this hunky, naked young foreigner, gives him clothes, a cellphone and wads of cash.

Soon Yoav moves into a squalid apartment across the river, still keeping contact with the young couple. He is an angry young man who is running away from home and refuses to speak Hebrew. He describes Israel as Ignorant, mean-spirited and crude. He is fit and has strict daily regimen for survival. He is listless, directionless and tactless. He gets a job as a security detail at the Israeli consulate. There he befriends with a typical macho soldier type, Yaron (Uria Hayik), who describe France as a hornet's nest for terrorists. Yaron forcefully asserts his Jewishness everywhere he goes by shouting "I am Jewish!" and humming Israeli national anthem loudly in a crowded subway to Parisians who could care less.

With his good physique and boyish good looks, Yoav gets involved in the art project by some pervert French photographer who tells him to penetrate himself while naked spread eagle on the floor, yelling in faux ecstasy in Hebrew. He feeds stories from his military service to impressionable Emile, telling him that he can have all of his stories as if he can truly hand over his former life to someone. He gets involved with Caroline even though whose high culture antics doesn't sit well with him. The flashback from his military service plays out, accented with absurd moments like dancing soldiers serenading a pop song during a military honor awarding ceremony.

Synonyms can be a difficult film: it can be seen as rudderless and abrasive. Sense of irony dominates the film as Yoav struggles with his identity. It's packed with dueling exaggerated visions of perverted and uncaring Europe (France in particular) and the uber military culture the director Nadav Lapid grew up with. The film concludes, as Yoav trying to open the door by slamming his body against it, you can't escape where you came from and the gap between the world you are trying to assimilate remains shut closed. But the film works, thanks largely to Tom mercier's physical as well as verbal, at times verging on slapstick level on both counts. The film is often hilarious and at times poignant and filled with manic energy. Shai Goldman's handheld camera work is aces also.