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July/August 2008
FILM WATCH
The City at the End of the Sea
There are many reasons to see Jellyfish, which won the 2007 Camera d’Or at Cannes, but a straightforward one is to watch a movie from Israel about relationships other than those between Jews and their enemies. Like In Treatment, the HBO drama that originated on Israeli television, Jellyfish chronicles people who might be living in any modern country, in that they are hobbled less by religion and war than by the smaller tragedies of modern life.
Still, the film—like the artists behind it, writer-directors Shira Geffen and Etgar Keret, a husband and wife team making their first feature film—is essentially “Tel-Avivian,” says Keret, dealing with “the relationship between the city and the ocean.” Its sea-city encounter is one of several pairings that ebb and wax through the film like tides. Although nothing newsworthy happens to the isolated souls who drift through the semi-surreal script, their small moments illuminate the ties and disconnects between parents and children, husbands and wives and language and silence, in a work that plays on the boundary between tangible experience and magic.
“Do you know how many people disappear?” a police officer in the missing persons bureau gruffly demands of 20-something Batya (Sarah Adler). The movie’s barely begun but, already, we see that this fey, under-employed waitress might know more about loss than most. Her boyfriend has left her and her self-obsessed mother—celebrity pitchwoman for, ironically, a charity focused on families—appears incapable of nurturing. Batya’s leaky apartment is gradually filling with water, and soon she will lose her crummy job.
Now, Batya fears she has lost a child: a wet, winsome creature of about five with round, fish-like eyes who came to her from the sea. The sea-child (Nikol Leidman) does not speak, yet she and Batya communicate more easily than most of the film’s atomized personae, who also include a pair of stranded newlyweds and a homesick Philippine aide and her cranky patient. At a dreamy, liquid pace, Jellyfish tracks these seekers through the city in a short-cuts style that recalls director Robert Altman’s 1975 tour de force Nashville, but is leavened with whimsy.
As their seemingly unrelated concerns begin to overlap, the characters wrestle with feelings and, especially, language and where it can, or can’t, take them. Like Keret’s terse and highly popular fiction (his books, including Meeting Kissinger and The Nimrod Flipout, are Israel’s most commonly shoplifted), the film itself employs an economy of words, unfolding more through silences and unfinished sentences than talky exposition.
Emotionally, however, the filmmakers are spendthrifts, drawing their scattered vignettes together with a generosity of feeling and richly layered symbolism. The sea-child’s voicelessness echoes in the story of sad-eyed Joy (Ma-nenita De Latorre), the Philippine aide separated by an ocean from her little boy. “I’m in Israel,” she tells him in an anguished call from a pay phone, “where the sea ends.” Joy’s difficulty with Hebrew aggravates her aging patient, Malka (Zaharira Harifai), yet the two move toward a wordless rapport even as Malka and her daughter, despite a world of words, grow only more estranged.
Words also bedevil Michael (Gera Sandler) and Keren (Noa Knoller), newlyweds marooned in the second-rate hotel where Batya works. Contending with dashed expectations far darker than their ruined honeymoon, they obsess about the sexually powerful middle-aged woman upstairs—a presumed poetess who struggles not just with words (“Is ‘eternally’ spelled with an aleph or an ayin?” she asks Michael in the elevator), but with unspoken demons the young couple only belatedly begin to understand.
Cutting from story to story, Jellyfish reveals pangs of love and loss and unkept promises. Eerily arching over all, literally, are the tented hands—forming a symbolically protective roof—of Batya’s mother, looking down benignly from billboards on the most forlorn encounters, as when Joy’s phone card runs out mid-sentence while her young son asks for a boat to bring her home.
Boats and the beach appear often in Jellyfish, a reminder of the ever-present sea on which its stories float. As the story crests, Batya, chasing the lost child, enters the sea itself where she finds, in the lost-and-found child’s uncanny blue realm, pieces of her own lost-and-found self, implying that pursuing our inner selves can be a form of drowning and simultaneous salvation. Whatever message we take from it, the candy-colored underwater image—like many of this poignant movie’s small epiphanies—lingers long after the credits roll.—Mandy Katz