Slightly surreal and gently melancholic

A few years back in Israel, the people who were against Jewish settlers being forced to move decided that they would adopt orange as their symbolic color. For Etgar Keret, the Israeli short-story writer and director of the new film “Jellyfish” -- which was written by his wife, poet Shira Geffen -- that posed a problem.

Keret was for resettlement but, he told me one snowy day in New York in February, “My best shirt -- it’s a Gap shirt, I bought it on sale, but it looks really expensive -- is an orange shirt. I usually wear it for my readings.” When Geffen told him he had to get rid of it, Keret turned for advice to his greengrocer, a Palestinian who told him under no circumstances must he stop wearing the shirt. Keret asked him why: “He said, ‘If you stop wearing it, then I will have to stop selling carrots. I’m a damn Arab. I can’t let a Jew outdo me.’ ”

The touch of absurdism in that tale, the serious and ponderous coming down to some friendly grousing while buying groceries, captures both the offbeat spirit of Keret’s fiction and the gentle, surreal melancholy of “Jellyfish.”

The film (which opens in Los Angeles today) won Keret and Geffen the Camera d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and was selected for this year’s New Directors/New Films series presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It’s a shaggy-dog story that floats by on a breeze.

It tells of three women -- a young waitress who finds an abandoned little girl at the beach; a bride who breaks her leg at her wedding reception and, in full cast, hobbles off to her honeymoon; and a Filipina domestic separated from her young son back home as she tries to find work in Tel Aviv. Did I mention that that little girl might be a mer-child? The stories of these three women run along separate tracks, sometimes intersecting, all of them taking odd, sometimes painful turns.

Keret, who lectures in the film department at Tel Aviv University and who made a short film 12 years ago, originally had no intention of directing a feature. “The reason I got into directing the film,” he told me, “was because nobody else wanted to.”

Keret, 40, whose story collections include the 2007 “The Nimrod Flipout” and “The Girl on the Fridge” (out this month), is dark-haired and scruffy with a mischievous manner and a delivery that’s deadpan and irascible. You can tell that what annoys him also, on some basic level, amuses him.

“My prime motivation to write stories,” Keret said, “is that I want to read them. I would be very happy if somebody else had done it, but they’re all lazy . . . , so I have to write it all by myself.” As he tells it, his decision to direct “Jellyfish” was a similar story of picking up the slack from the goldbrickers out there.

“My wife wrote this wonderful script, and I said, ‘I really want to see this film.’ She showed it to one director who said it was never going to work. She showed it to another who said, ‘This is boring.’ The third one said, ‘This is completely confused.’ . . . The moment I suggested directing the film I looked at my wife’s eye and knew if we didn’t do it, this film will never be done.”

Asked about the experience of making a film for the first time, what Keret describes is a DIY approach that any self-respecting punk rocker might have envied. He tells a story about a scene in the film in which one character looks at an old photograph that comes to life before our eyes, the clothing on the people in it flapping in a nonexistent breeze: “The special-effects guy said, ‘It has to flap more, because half of the [audience] is going to miss it.’ I said to him, ‘ . . . them! This moment isn’t for them. It’s for the half that will see.’ ”

Keret went on, “I want it to be so that the person who watches it will have the slightest doubt that maybe it didn’t happen, that he will look at the guy next to him and say, ‘Did you see that?’ ” Keret was unmoved by the special-effects man’s insistence that he didn’t understand film. “I said, ‘It’s a good thing, then, I’m keeping my day job.’ I don’t give a . . . if this film is going to fail. It’s not my career. I’m just coming here to do what I want to do. My wife and I said, ‘If people are crazy enough to give us money to do the film, we’re going to do what we want to do.’ ”

For the last few years the literary world has been taken with bemoaning the decline of reading in a visual, digital age. (It’s a bogus argument resting on the assumption that reading is always active and viewing always passive, and it also, as Mikita Brottman points out in her new polemic, “The Solitary Vice,” ignores the fact that reading is a visual activity.) Keret appears to find the argument irrelevant. What he likes in art, he said, is ambiguity.

That taste, combined with Keret’s pugnaciousness, has gotten him into some scrapes in Israel. Right-wing members of the Knesset called for the cancellation of a comedy show Keret writes for because it featured a sketch, written by Keret, in which an Israeli delegation attempts to persuade a judge at a German track meet to allow the Israeli runner to run a shorter race. After all, they argue, the runner’s parents were Holocaust victims. Keret, both of whose parents survived the Holocaust, tells me that, for him, the sketch was political discourse, a response to the politicians who have used what people like his parents went through for political expediency.

Keret sees a pressure on Israeli artists to address the situation in the Middle East. The problem, Keret said, is that he doesn’t want to “lose my ability to communicate with anybody who’s not in my tribe. Some places you need people to lead. Other places you need people to confuse those who are leading. Being a writer,” he added with a wry grin, “I’m not extremely good at living. So I say, ‘OK, this is what I have to give.’ This causes a lot of antagonism and friction.”

What, for instance, does he say to those who ask him why he’s wearing orange? “I say I’m a supporter of the Dutch soccer team.”