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| 'The Band's Visit' Small but Wise |
| Directed by Eran Kolirin (2007) |
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Howard Schumann (howard16)  |
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Published 2008-02-25 04:49 (KST) |
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 |  | | | | | | ©2008 Sony Pictures Releasing | A fully uniformed Egyptian police band arrives in Israel to perform at the opening ceremony of a new Arab Cultural Center but no one shows up to meet them at the airport. Lonely and tired, they end up taking the wrong bus and find themselves in Bet Hatikvah, a lonely outpost in the Negev that, according to one of its residents, not only doesn't have a cultural center but has no culture.
Unable to get transportation until the next morning, the band agrees to stay overnight at a local restaurant run by Dina (Ronit Elkabetz), a free-spirited but lonely Israeli restaurateur who longs for companionship.
Eran Kolirin's "The Band's Visit" ("Bikur Ha-Tizmoret") is the story of the small connections that bring people together. Israeli's submission as Best Foreign Film at the Oscars (rejected because much of its dialogue is in English), it is about what some of us have lost in modern society -- the ability to reach across cultural, political and language barriers to connect with fellow human beings.
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FROM THE SECTION |
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| Over the course of the evening, the Israelis and the Egyptians approach each other tentatively and little by little, the staid Egyptians open up to their Israeli hosts, finding some common ground exemplified in a spontaneous dinner table rendition of George Gershwin's "Summertime."
When the two groups begin to get to know each other, they find that beneath the language and cultural differences, they are simply people -- full of joy and sadness, friendship and loneliness, connection and loss.
Tewfiq (Sasson Gabai), the conductor of the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, is formal and rigid in his demeanor but is able to strike up a friendship with Dina. After some awkward silences the melancholy conductor reveals details of tragic losses in his family, and how he feels that he is to blame.
Another band member, Khaled (Saleh Bakri), decides to accompany local Papi (Shlomi Avraham) and his date to a roller skating rink. In a memorable scene, Khaled offers the socially backward Papi some instructions on courting his shy girlfriend.
In another moving sequence, band member Simon (Kalifa Natour) plays a lovely but unfinished composition for the clarinet for Itzik (Rubi Moscovich), who tells him that he should end the piece not with a traditional showy display but with what there is for him at the moment, "not sad, not happy, a small room, a lamp, a bed, a child sleeping and tons of loneliness."
"The Band's Visit" is a film about Israelis and Arabs but without the usual backdrop of boundary disputes, the peace process or the religious divide. It even avoids the cliches about how music is a universal language. It is a small film but wise in its understated depiction of humanity's common bonds, slow-paced but held together with a sensitive charm.
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©2008 OhmyNews
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