Yes Repeat No (2023) Film Review
Yes Repeat No is a conceptual feature that doesn’t resemble anything you’ve ever seen before. It’s bold, critical, and very, very tense. And it also seems like the only way to address the reality of its subject. In the film, three actors are auditioning to play the part of actor and activist Juliano Mer-Khamis, a former IDF paratrooper who defiantly identified as “100% Palestinian and 100% Jewish.” He actually way was Palestinian-Jewish and little do we know about how he led his worlds-colliding message all the way throughout to the tragic ending of his life.
With Michael Dahan‘s film Yes Repeat No, you will get an idea.
Alongside the actors, who seem trapped in a theater trying to interpret their goal, there’s a director who throws around pointers about what they should do and most important, which Juliano they’re actually playing. There’s the Public, the Israeli and the Arab, and they all clash to the rhythm of a damn metronome that gets louder as tensions rise.
Dahan’s made a very clever film about the enigma of a man we will sadly not understand enough to observe how he was able to make it in an industry that’s never been tolerant on dualism and this kind of political nuances. We get glimpses of Mer-Khamis acting in the 1984 film The Little Drummer Girl and the actors follow the orders of a director that implies there’s a code hidden in the actor’s role. This is one of the only connections the film has with reality in its meta story. Audiences that don’t follow the message from the beginning will themselves confused when Dahan shows up on the screen and sort of breaks the remaining wall.
The metaphorical aspect of the three personalities clashing with each other in this tight space of supposed artistic freedom is enlightening and very effective in the end. This is an intelligent take on identity inspired by the life and work of a man who surfed between worlds that despise each other. This is an exercise in tension that tells an improbable story, a non-traditional biography that doesn’t cut corners by being simple. Mer-Khamis was a complex man who spoke about conflict whenever he had to, but also represented humanity in a hate-ridden mechanism of war. To meet him, to understand him, and to ultimately admire him through a film like Yes Repeat No, is relatively easy.
Imagine being self-aware of your inner conflicts and the different sides of your personality. Imagine three actors trying to portray the different yous, and you will get the idea of the conceptual vehicle Yes Repeat No. Perhaps it could actually be a good exercise to understand yourself and those times when you’re in conflict with an idea that lives only inside of you.
