Seductive AND intoxicating, playfully surreal and inexplicably moving, "Jellyfish" is almost impossible to pin down or even categorize. Artistic, daring, surprising, it resists fitting into words at all.
That's ironic because its Israeli co-directors, Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen (who jointly won Cannes' coveted Camera d'Or for best first film for "Jellyfish"), live lives that revolve around the very particular use of words.
Geffen, who did the screenplay, is a creator of plays and children's books, while Keret, her directing and life partner, is one of Israel's hottest contemporary authors, a humanist as well as a mischievous absurdist described by Salman Rushdie as "completely unlike any writer I know." One of his singular short stories was turned into the independent success "Wristcutters," and a new collection, "The Girl on the Fridge," including a tale about a woman who crazy-glues her feet to the ceiling, is due out this month.
"Jellyfish's" story of three women and their loosely connected lives is both part of a remarkable renaissance for Israeli cinema and apart from it.
On the one hand, it couldn't be more different in tone from the wave of intensely dramatic films, such as "Beaufort," "Broken Wings," "Late Marriage" and "The Syrian Bride," that have impressed moviegoers worldwide.
But all these films, including "Jellyfish," come from the same place, from a society in crisis where things are not going as planned, where, as the directors explain in a filmmakers' statement, people may be "under the illusion that they can design their own destinies but the reality is that they wander like jellyfish, without being able to exercise any form of control over their lives."
"Jellyfish" introduces its trio of protagonists in the most casual way possible, as the camera all but randomly focuses on them at a big Tel Aviv wedding reception. Both at this party and afterward, these characters don't know the others exist, but the audience observes them more or less bumping into each other in ways only we are aware of.
Batya (Sarah Adler) is as close as "Jellyfish" gets to an actual protagonist. A young woman whose haphazard life is noticeably falling apart, barely able to function as a waitress at the reception, Batya ends up taking care of a sweet but willful 5-year-old girl who runs up to her out of the sea but refuses to talk.
