In 'Jellyfish,' Etgar Keret sees life as slightly surreal and gently melancholic
The film's director describes its genesis amid the political and artistic complexities of Israel.
A few years back in Israel, the people who were against Jewish settlers being forced to move decided that they would adopt orange as their symbolic color. For Etgar Keret, the Israeli short-story writer and director of the new film "Jellyfish" -- which was written by his wife, poet Shira Geffen -- that posed a problem.
Keret was for resettlement but, he told me one snowy day in New York in February, "My best shirt -- it's a Gap shirt, I bought it on sale, but it looks really expensive -- is an orange shirt. I usually wear it for my readings." When Geffen told him he had to get rid of it, Keret turned for advice to his greengrocer, a Palestinian who told him under no circumstances must he stop wearing the shirt. Keret asked him why: "He said, 'If you stop wearing it, then I will have to stop selling carrots. I'm a damn Arab. I can't let a Jew outdo me.' "
The touch of absurdism in that tale, the serious and ponderous coming down to some friendly grousing while buying groceries, captures both the offbeat spirit of Keret's fiction and the gentle, surreal melancholy of "Jellyfish."
The film (which opens in Los Angeles today) won Keret and Geffen the Camera d'Or at last year's Cannes Film Festival and was selected for this year's New Directors/New Films series presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It's a shaggy-dog story that floats by on a breeze.
It tells of three women -- a young waitress who finds an abandoned little girl at the beach; a bride who breaks her leg at her wedding reception and, in full cast, hobbles off to her honeymoon; and a Filipina domestic separated from her young son back home as she tries to find work in Tel Aviv. Did I mention that that little girl might be a mer-child? The stories of these three women run along separate tracks, sometimes intersecting, all of them taking odd, sometimes painful turns.
Keret, who lectures in the film department at Tel Aviv University and who made a short film 12 years ago, originally had no intention of directing a feature. "The reason I got into directing the film," he told me, "was because nobody else wanted to."
Keret, 40, whose story collections include the 2007 "The Nimrod Flipout" and "The Girl on the Fridge" (out this month), is dark-haired and scruffy with a mischievous manner and a delivery that's deadpan and irascible. You can tell that what annoys him also, on some basic level, amuses him.
