Meduzot (2007)

Directors:

Shira Geffen
Etgar Keret

Sceneggiatore:

Shira Geffen (writer)

Data di uscita:

28 giugno 2007 (Israel)

Genere:

Drama

Slogan:

Love. Longing. Magic. (USA)

Plot:

Meduzot (the Hebrew word for Jellyfish) tells the story of three very different Israeli women living...

Plot Keywords:

Jellyfish | Paper Boat | Hotel | Mother Daughter Relationship | Underwater Scene

Premi:

4 wins & 11 nominations

Recensioni degli utenti:

Pretentious and dull

Cast

Sarah Adler	...	Batia
Nikol Leidman	...	Girl
Gera Sandler	...	Michael
Noa Knoller	...	Keren
Ma-nenita De Latorre	...	Joy
Zaharira Harifai	...	Malka
resto del cast in ordine alfabetico:
Tsipor Aizen	...	Tamar
Bruria Albeck	...	Relly
Ilanit Ben-Yaakov	...	Galia
Assi Dayan	...	Eldad
Miri Fabian	...	Nili
Shosha Goren	...	Tikva
Tzahi Grad	...	Police Man
Johnathan Gurfinkel	...	Amir
Amir Harel	...	Doctor
Tami Harel	...	Nurse
Yitzhak Hizkiya	...	Eytan
Dror Keren	...	Taxi-Driver
Efraim Keret	...	Ice seller
Etgar Keret	...	Manager
Naama Nisim	...	Neomi
Shalom Shmuelov	...	Menachem
Amos Shoov	...	Eyal
Yali Sobol	...	Amir
Liron Vaisman	...	Shiri

Alias:

Jellyfish (International: English title) (literal title)
Méduses, Les (France)
Meduse (Italy) (literal title) [it]

Durata:

78 min

Nazionalità:

France | Israel

Lingua:

Ebraico | Inglese | Tagalog | Tedesco

Colore:

Colore

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sonoro:

Dolby Digital

Divieti:

Switzerland:10 (canton of Vaud) | Germany:6 | South Korea:12 | Argentina:13 | USA:Unrated | Switzerland:10 (canton of Geneva)

Luoghi delle riprese:

Tel Aviv, Israel

Company:

Canal+

Curiosità:

The ice-cream vendor is played by the father of co-director Etgar Keret.

Pretentious and dull

I went to see this because I'd never seen Tel-Aviv, where the story is set. I was disappointed, since it doesn't offer many views of Israel's largest metropolis. It's also pretentious—one of those movies that leaves you guessing at its meaning until you ultimately give up with a shrug of the shoulders.

The main protagonist is Batya, a woman in her twenties' who works as a waitress at catered weddings. Her parents evidently don't care about her very much, and when a little girl walks out of the sea with an inflatable ring around her, Batya feels compelled to take care of her. The little girl doesn't speak, and Batya can't give her to social services because it's the weekend and the agency is closed. So she takes her back to her apartment with the leaky roof, and when it comes time to work in the evening, she has to take the little girl with her. The boss is very unhappy about this and other shortcomings in Batya's work performance.

Another main character is Keren, who is getting married. At her wedding party (where Batya is of course working), she breaks her leg climbing out of a ladies' room cubicle whose door won't open, and so she and her new husband cannot take the Caribbean vacation they've planned. They end up in a dingy hotel on the seafront without a view. It smells bad, there is noise from the traffic, and Keren is complaining all the time. Her husband meets a strangely attractive older woman – a writer – who is also staying in the hotel, and Keren worries that he has slept with this stranger.

The third main character is a Filipino woman named Joy who looks after old people. The old woman she is hired to care for is very crabby and speaks no English, only German and Hebrew. Joy speaks English but no Hebrew or German. Joy is mostly concerned with how her son is doing back in the Philippines, and wants to buy him a toy boat, as he has asked. She finds the perfect boat in a store and plans to buy it. The daughter of the old woman, who hired Joy, is an actress appearing in some sort of post-modern "physical theater" adaptation of Hamlet, and does not get along with her mother.

The way in which these three stories—which intersect momentarily—resolve themselves is presumably supposed to mean something profound. I didn't get it. There is a fantasy element to Batya's relationship with the little girl, and maybe Batya's non-existent relationship with her parents is somehow inverted in this relationship. When Joy sees the toy boat in the shop window, there is a strange effect used where the little sails billow as if blown by the wind, and they do this as if they are on the scale of a real-life ship. Keren draws the outline of a bottle around a ship that is on a brochure cover in the hotel room, and a narration of the strange woman's poetry mentions a ship in a bottle. But what does all this mean? I thought about it for a while and realized I wasn't going to lose any sleep in the process. If anyone out there has a clear idea of what it's all about, maybe they can fill me in.