Shy Tel Aviv catering waitress Batya (Sarah Adler) is having a hard time dealing with the aftermath of her recent breakup with her boyfriend. She walks through her days and nights in something of a hollow-eyed malaise, doing little to keep up her appearance or make a personal connection with another human being.

Nikol Leidman and Sarah Adler in Zeitgeist Films' Jellyfish

Keren (Noa Knoller) was the lovely bride getting married at Batya’s last catering job, but after an accident in the bathroom leaves her with a broken ankle her hopes of a happy honeymoon in the Caribbean with new husband Michael (Gera Sandler) is quickly dashed. Now they head to the Israeli coast, the hotel the supposedly happy newlywed couple find themselves in full of noisy distractions driving the both of them into a funky depression trying to rob them of their newfound marital bliss.

Also at the wedding is Joy (Ma-nenita De Latorre), a non-Hebrew speaking Philippine native there with her employer. She’s come to the country to try and make enough money to give her family a better life back home, working as hard as she can for a cantankerous old woman in the hope she’ll be able to do for her adolescent son all her parents were never able to do for her.

The lives of these three women intersect and connect in a multitude of ways in directors Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen’s debut feature Jellyfish. Winner of the Camera d’Or at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, this strangely beguiling film bobs and weaves through its characters lives in fascinatingly original and unique ways. It is a film of shattering impact and wondrous heart, and even if it isn’t altogether perfect I felt so connected to all these lives so intimately I was almost sad to see them go.

Some of it, like the bitter, sometimes coarse, ultimately uplifting relationship between Joy and her elderly client, feels grounded striking reality. Other bits, like the bizarre appearance by a wraith-like child who comes out of the sea like a cherub-faced pint-sized squid, is eerily surreal. Yet when everything is finally added together and all the pieces start twirling around trying to find a place to fit, the weird and the concrete come together to form a portrait of feminine life in Israel impossible to forget.

So, I guess I could make the case that some of the tangents are almost too odd for their own good. All of the vignettes with Keren and Michael inside their hotel didn’t quite work for me, while a subplot involving Batya and her famous mother putting on some sort of fundraiser goes pretty much nowhere. I can’t exactly say I quite understood where that particular woman’s constant moodiness kept coming from, either, and for a little while during the first act I really could have cared less about her.

Yet Keret and Geffen keep the pace moving with a sublimely kinetic grace that’s absolutely magnetic. The film doesn’t so much move as glide, each scene seeming to tumble in one after the other like a slowly crashing wave coming into contact with the shore. I couldn’t take my eyes away from it, and with each of the women giving such beautifully distinct performances of such striking passion why I would have wanted to isn’t even a question I’d even remotely care to answer.

By the time it was all over and the absolute Cassavetes-like certainty gave way to a playfully Lynch-ian otherworldliness I was so enraptured by the film’s magical spell people could have started swimming across the screen like gold fish and I probably still would have found the picture to be an intoxicatingly beautiful experience. While they (thankfully) don’t do that, the effect Jellyfish has on a viewer is no less profound and wondrous, and I for one can’t wait to see what these two wildly talented filmmakers choose to do next.

Film Rating: êêê  (out of 4)

Additional Links:

-  Jellyfish Theatrical Trailer