By Julio Nakamurakare
Herald staff

It is not often the case that film critics have a hard time trying to discern or, even less so, classify the category or genre of a movie.

We have all seen choral movies — Jellyfish is one, without a doubt — whose characters’ travails and tribulations intersect in convoluted yet seemingly logical manner, as in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores Perros (Love is a Bitch, Mexico, 2009); Wayne Wang’s Smoke, written by novelist Paul Auster (1995), which makes use and overuse of coincidence and chance encounters that challenge the notion of suspension of disbelief; Martín Rejtman’s in a sidesplitting, perennial state of apathy (Silvia Prieto; Argentina, 1999); or, again González Iñárritu’s 2006 globe-encompassing Babel, which kicks off when tragedy strikes a couple of newlyweds in Morocco to finally move onto unbelievable near degrees of separation and closeness, in the far east, in a luxury highrise apartment inhabited by father and daugther living in physically close but spiritually removed bond.

In many regards, Jellyfish is as extraordinary like the abovementioned films, but it needs not be a globetrotting experience round the whole planet to reach out at the core of human life lived at its deepest, funniest and most tragical, all at once, simultaneously, with a minimum sense of progression conveyed by the stories of a restricted number of people, quantitavely speaking.

Jellyfish, in geographical terms, does not venture beyond the borders of shell-bombed Tel Aviv — warfare, the massacre type, is part of daily life there.

However, Jellyfish, a delicious comedy that stands on its own as a triumph of the genre, while not ignoring a city’, a country’s, and a people’s afflictions, offers infinite possibilities to expand people’s horizons to strategical points of departure and arrival, which otherwise they would have never imaged themselves in, had it not been for the film’s succession of unexpected but inexorably risible circumstances.

In spite of the apparent random manner in which the events in Jellyfish develop, it is writers-directors Geffen and Keter’s meticulously orchestrated script that keeps things moving at different velocity — at ants’ pace; gently, like a breeze; or racing past at the speed of thunder.

The Jewish are justly renowned for the never-ending fun, joie de vivre and living out the night like there was no tomorrow. And right they are, for life in Israel, in Iran, or in almost any other war-torn country, can be as ephemeral as a passing glance; as ridiculously, absurdly yet logically short as a run to the next door store for a tobacco fix.

Jellyfish, one of whose admittedly trivial but factual virtues is that war and the Holocaust are never mentioned, save for one rare instance, is precisely that: its 78 minutes run a lifespan filled with absurdly humorous chance encounters, comings and goings, unbelievably fateful coincidences, a comedy of manners seamlessly segued onto unexpected cascades of tearjerking moments.

Jellyfish sets the opening scene at, precisely, one of those occasions when people have full leeway for gratification: a wedding party that tries to beat out the clan’s previous one by at least one or two notches.
Tragedy strikes not when a bomb or a grenade explode — it happens when the bride finds herself locked in the ballroom’s toilet and, in a desperate attempt to break out, ends up breaking a leg. Talk about theatricals.

Gone is the dream of a fabulous honeymoon in the Caribbean, and down it is to “just married” cohabitation in a hotel that’s seen better days, a room with no view of the sea, a dumpster of a beach, hardly audible attempts at conversation due to the deafening noise of Tel Aviv’s congested traffic, the stench of edibles in advanced state of putrefaction coming from the kitchen, the television blaring out DIY ads and the remote as the only window out to the world.

One degree of separation from the newlyweds is Batia, who waits tables at fastuous wedding receptions — the only way she has found to pay the rent at a pathetically decaying building.

Life can be hard in Tel Aviv, or in any metropolis where the infamously rich enjoy themselves side by side with the pitifully destitute, not to mention the toils, tension and stress of daily life on the edge they must experience as a given.

But neither war nor conflagration provide the setting or the scenario around which the well-oiled script of Jellyfish rolls — it’s not a matter of ignoring or turning a blind eye on reality, but rather a safe way of preventing it from entering places where there’s been too much of it, an overprofusion of bellicism in permanent collision or coexistence.

The sidesplitting chain of events in Jellyfish are prompted and propelled ahead by Batia and her leg injury, which comes at the worst of times.

But then it’s the famous Butterfly Effect that unavoidably unleashes a series of movements in the lives of people with closer or further degrees of separation, all united in an amalgam of occurrences, happenings, actions and comically tragic or, conversely, tragically comic developments.

The bride whose honeymoon has been absurdly thwarted by fate propels the events and is also the player in charge of kickoff when the moment comes to get the game off to a start and to keep the ball rolling.
It’s mainly Batia, her conundrums and the chain of people inexorably linked to them that help maintain Jellyfish’s brilliantly executed, mammoth amount of self-referential, self-inflicting moments of goodhearted guffaws at the blunders and the insanely comic adventures of life played as it lays — facing the unexpected and the reasonably unexpectable with the type of full frontal stupefaction and calmness all humans ought to be capable of.

Production Notes

MEDUZOT (Jellyfish / Medusas). France/Israel, 2007. In Hebrew, English, Tagalog and German, with Spanish-language subtitles. Directed by: Shira Geffen and Etgar Keret. Written by: Shira Geffen. With: Sarah Adler, Nikol Leidman, Gera Sandler, Noa Knoller, Ma-nenita De Latorre and Zaharira Harifai. Distributed by Mirada. NC13. Running time: 78 minutes.