Saturday, May 30, 2009
Jellyfish: A film from Israel
Jellyfish (Meduzot), an Israeli film directed by Shira Geffen and Etgar Keret is one of those films I knew I liked a lot after the first few shots. It is no accident that it won the Camera d'or, the Cannes film festival award for best first feature. It features stories of three women in Tel Aviv, loosely interweaving and overlapping them.
Batya works for a wedding caterer. Joy is a Filipino guest worker giving support giver for elders wanting to make it home to her son. Keren is a newlywed who injured herself crawling over a locked stall at her wedding, an injury that forces her and new husband to stay at a local hotel instead of taking off for the Caribbean for a honeymoon. Keren appears to be high maintenance and superficial harpie, but the audience learns differently as the film transpires.
Jellyfish is filled with chance, circumstance, and sometimes destiny reminding me of Tom Twyker's Winterschläfer. It also pulls of some moments of magical realism that actually come off well. Directors Geffen and Keret fill their movie with thought provoking connections between the characters or the characters and their history amid solid imagery. Their being awarded the Camera d'Or was not a token or accident. Coming across a film like Jellyfish is a reassurance that film is international, universal, and still a wellspring from which viewers have the opporunity to make discoveries of films like this one.
posted by well-executed buffet at 10:19 PM
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