Emerging from the Deep: Jellyfish Come to American Shores

Shira Geffen and Etgar Keret are each already highly-acclaimed in Israel and abroad—Geffen as a playwright, theater director and actress, and Keret as a fiction and screenplay author. Their transition to directing film has proven to be just as successful. The Israeli couple’s debut feature, Jellyfish, won the Camera d’Or prize at the 2007 Cannes International Film Festival for best first feature and has been enthusiastically received at numerous other film festivals around the world.

The film begins with a little girl at the beach with her parents, who are engrossed in an argument. As the child plays in the water, the parents continue to argue—they don’t notice their daughter being pulled into the sea and drifting away. These images from a short story written several years ago by Shira Geffen are the inspiration for the screenplay and form the emotional basis of the film: “the feeling of being in the water and not being able to feel the ground under your feet,” as Geffen describes.

In Jellyfish, the little girl takes the form of an unnamed five-year-old (Nikol Leidman) who emerges mysteriously out of the sea wearing nothing but panties and a striped inner tube. Instead of her parents, the child encounters Batya (Sarah Adler), a young, sad-eyed waitress whose boyfriend recently left her. The child, who does not speak a single word, attaches herself to Batya and follows her home to a run-down apartment—where the roof is leaking and the landlord still demands rent payments that Batya can barely afford.

The setting is the coastal Israeli city of Tel Aviv, which is also where Shira Geffen and Etgar Keret have spent most of their lives. The beach where many of the scenes were shot is where Keret’s father had a kiosk and sold ice-cream when Keret was a child; the building in which Geffen and Keret first lived together also makes an appearance in the film. Nevertheless, Jellyfish is not only about life in Tel Aviv. Geffen insists it is about more universal experiences—the conflicts and heartbreaks of people in the modern, urban world. The filmmakers intentionally aimed to keep the city abstract, “like the city of a fairy tale,” says Geffen. This city is populated by individuals who cross paths but are strangers to one another; their stories interweave at various moments in the film but they are mostly unaware of their connection.

As such, Jellyfish exposes the breakdown of structures and institutions—both emotional and physical—that were once stable and reliable. “The feeling in the film is that everything is disintegrating, malfunctioning,” says Keret. “The same way Batya’s house is falling apart and is flooded with water, everything doesn’t work—the police don’t seem to work, the parents don’t function, the children don’t seem to be able to take care of the parents.”

The feeling of disintegration is reinforced by striking visual elements interspersed throughout the film: Keren’s wedding gown crumpled on the floor of a bathroom stall and her broken leg in a cast; beautiful flowers wilting in Batya’s hands and water pouring from the ceiling of her apartment into the mute little girl’s mouth; and the sea with its unrelenting power of erosion as the film’s overall, blue-tinged backdrop.

This underlying role of the sea is a central symbol in the film. Etgar Keret elaborates, “When you live in Tel Aviv, you really feel like there is the sea and there is the city. And in some unconscious way they are in a war. It’s kind of a war between nature and manufactured reality, between the subconscious and rational, between concrete matter and liquid—you feel this clash. All the houses near the beach in Tel Aviv are starting to fall apart because of the effect of the sea, as if the sea is trying to drive them away. I think that this was something very dominant [in the film]—I could smell the beach and the sea from every page of the screenplay.”

Like the feeling of being swept away by the currents of the sea, the characters in Jellyfish share the experience of drifting through life without really knowing the direction in which they are moving. They often feel overwhelmed, powerless, and alone. But somewhere along the way they rediscover an inner strength that reminds them that they can be the captains of their own destinies—at least to an extent. The music at the end of the film, a Hebrew cover version of “La Vie en Rose,” reinforces the optimism that prevails even amid all the heartache.