The Band’s Visit was supposed to be Israel’s entry into the Best Foreign Language Film category for this year’s Academy Awards. But it wasn’t, for the oddest reason. It also made news when it was invited, and then disinvited, to the Middle East Film Festival in Abu Dhabi. That’s just part of the reason you should not miss The Band’s Visit (Bikur HaTizmoret), opening February 29 at the Harvard Exit. The other reasons are all about art: the characters, the pacing, the universal truth about our human need for connectedness. And the music.
I don’t usually write about movies — music is my usual beat — but I really wanted to share this one with you. Here is a story about a group of musicians whose band might go extinct if their big break — a public gig, a politically sensitive tour — goes awry. Such threats lurk in every corner of the music world, but especially vulnerable are the community orchestras, where the players love music as much as the famous artists do, but nobody beyond their little public much knows or cares.
The Egyptian “Band” in the title of Eran Kolirin’s new film is something called the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, and for them, the invitation to perform in Israel, at the opening of an Arab cultural center, is a great honor. Or is it? No one meets them at the airport. No one there knows who they are. And, apparently, no one they need knows where they are.
Band leader Tewfik (Sasson Gabai) wears a face full of worry. Managing the band with a combination of both parental and military authority, he winds up with his men in a remote desert town rather than the major city where they were supposed to end up — thanks to the stumbling efforts of the youngster of the group, a suave Casanova named Khaled (Saleh Bakri). Khaled is the only member of the band with things like the language skills to arrange for bus tickets.
Between Khaled’s accent and his flirtation with the ticket window gal, he manages to get the band to what looks like the middle of nowhere. Ironically, both this desert town and the big city where they are supposed to be have the word “tikvah” — hope — in their names, and it’s a very human hope that’s at the center of the story here.
The half-dozen band members find food and hospitality thanks to a dusty café and its worldly and beautiful manager Dina (Ronit Elkabetz), and, eventually, they get to where they were headed. It’s a short story, really. But it’s full of telling detail: the way one band member, eating lunch at last, hangs his hat over a photo of destroyed Egyptian tanks on the café wall. The hint of small-town infidelity, in a glance across a family restaurant late at night. The sweetly hilarious mentoring by Khaled of a naïve young Israeli guy and his unfortunate blind date at a funky little roller skating rink.
Family tensions silence a table where the wife’s birthday dinner must accommodate the unexpected and uncomfortable guests, and music ends up thawing the chill just enough for everyone to make it through the night.
Khaled’s standard pickup line may cause a spike in the sales of Chet Baker recordings — jazz is always good for a suave guy’s image. And The Band’s Visit may cause — or should cause — a serious thought or two about what constitutes an award-worthy “foreign language film.” This movie wasn’t eligible for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nomination, said the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, because too great a percentage of the dialogue is in English. Never mind that this broken English, the one tool that these characters have for communicating at all, at least starts these wary neighbors on a journey toward each other.
Never mind that that the film’s very plot turns on an Israeli’s misunderstanding of an Arabic-speaker’s accent. Nor that it’s a sensitive treatment of issues both personal and political, featuring some outstanding Israeli and Palestinian actors. Maybe, in our rapidly shrinking media universe, the very notion of “foreign” is becoming foreign. Meanwhile, The Band’s Visit has been honored at festivals around the world, including Cannes, where Sony Classics picked it up for distribution.
The Israeli director, Eran Kolirin, says he grew up watching Egyptian movies on TV every Friday afternoon. He gives that experience to his character Dina, who tells Tewfik about it in the film’s most intimate, conversational, moments. As she reveals to Tewfik her fantasy romance with Omar Sharif and company, she and he — and we — touch that human place where hunger gives way to tenderness and hope.