This Israeli winner of the Caméra d’Or for Best First Film at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival presents a mosaic of intersecting characters, much like the recent films Crash and Babel. Jellyfish has a more magical and cryptic tone, however, layering its realistic appearance with somewhat flightier content. Set in contemporary Tel Aviv, Jellyfish alights on three discrete women whose circumstances provide welcome portraits of modern life in Israel. If they are representative, the women of Israel are an amorphously yearning lot, full of indistinct desires, unfulfilled dreams, and water-based reference points. They are, no doubt, like the glutinous jellyfish tossed to and fro by the ocean. Keren (Knoller) is a new bride who breaks her leg during the wedding reception and has to cancel her honeymoon to the Caribbean. She and her husband, Michael (Sandler), instead take a room in a Tel Aviv seaside hotel with no view of the sea, and it’s not long before their notion of connubial bliss turns into a vision of eternal frustration. Batya (Adler) is a waitress for a catering company specializing in weddings whose life finds some temporary purpose when a mysterious 5-year-old girl (Leidman) emerges from the sea and latches on to her. Joy (De Latorre) is a Filipina home health-care worker, who doesn’t speak a word of Hebrew and longs for her young son back home. First-time co-director Keret is an internationally acclaimed author, whose partner, Geffen, wrote this film’s screenplay and also co-directed. Jellyfish has clear literary aspirations, yet it’s hard to exactly grasp what the film is trying to communicate. There are sharply observed moments of social intercourse and a nice current of realistic honesty. But when I ask myself what it is that these women in the movie want, I come up with bubkes.
This article appears in July 11 • 2008.
