Jellyfish and Other Surreal Tales

This year's excellent New Directors/New Films series, a yearly collaboration of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA that ended last week, had many films you will see in theaters in the coming months. One, “Jellyfish,” directed by Israeli fiction writer Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen, his wife and the movie's scriptwriter, is already out: in this fine, intimate film, the dislocation and suffering taking place in their home country among a group of recent immigrants is reflected in water, in places where it is welcome, healing and mysterious, as in the beach in Tel Aviv and unwelcome, as a rising flood in a young woman's apartment caused by a leak. At one point she stands mouth agape, water pouring down from the ceiling quenching her thirst. Such surreal images dominate Keret's fiction. His new book,   “The Girl on the Fridge” features a tale called “Crazy Glue” in which a girl is stuck on that substance “so pretty, and so incongruous, hanging upside down from the ceiling that way. . . . I climbed onto the pile of books and kissed her.” The image brought to mind lovers in a Chagall painting. The stories, some one-pagers, can be selected like bonbons out of a chocolate assortment, each offering a peculiar, offbeat yet surprisingly satisfying center. In the title story, a couple breaks up for no better reason than the girl liked being alone, as when in childhood, she stayed perched atop a refrigerator. Her lover even tried to fuck her there, to no avail. I asked Etgar Keret which he prefers, making film or writing stories. “Writing,” he said, “I have all the control.”

Regina Weinreich            

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura