Friday, February 29, 2008

Movie review: The Band’s Visit

Detente with dentition.

By John P. Meyer

The Band's Visit is one of those rare unsuspected delights that makes a movie reviewer's job particularly gratifying. As opposed to something like this.

Maybe not the middle of nowhere, but close enough for practical purposes

I have to admit, when I read the brief descriptor for this film I was not moved to drop everything in order to attend. In fact, had the preview screening (with director Eran Kolirin in attendance) not occurred on an otherwise uneventful Sunday evening I might have been tempted to come up with an excuse for abstaining - something along the lines of "I'm scheduled for a teeth cleaning, and my dentist is leaving town tomorrow - forever." Fortunately, I acted like a professional and showed up, notebook in hand.

My heartfelt advice: get out to your local arthouse cinema and see The Band's Visit during whatever brief theatrical run the gods of movie distribution allow it. Why? Here are three elements that make it "can't miss" film fare:

1. Accomplished cinematic storytelling technique employed in relating a hopeful, heartwarming tale of inter-cultural cooperation;

2. A wry visual sense of humor; and

3. A cast full of eccentric, uncontrived characters you'll remember fondly for many moons to come.

Take Haled (Saleh Bakri), for instance: he's the band's trombone player, a rakish and engagingly sympathetic young fellow who uses his interest in the music of Chet Baker ("My Funny Valentine") as a means of striking up conversations with random attractive young women.

And then there's Dina (Ronit Elkabetz), the haughty, raven-haired proprietress of a sleepy little cafe in the sleepy little Israeli desert hamlet where the band members accidentally end up. Dina is a woman whose aspirations have fled, and she seems not to mind it; a town with no cultural identity seems just the place for her.

Dina finally succeeds in loosening up Tawfiq. (Yes, that's him being loose.)

Tawfiq (Sasson Gabai) is the straight-laced, stern-faced leader of the band. His crusty exterior hides a vulnerability and sweetness never imagined by his charges, and only briefly glimpsed by Dina after her Herculean efforts to loosen him up pay off in some small measure.

The story centers on an Egyptian ceremonial band, sent to a small town in Israeli territory to celebrate the opening of an Arab cultural center. When the band members arrive at the strangely deserted Tel Aviv airport, they find no one there to meet them, no idea how to get where they're supposed to be going, and no luck making phone contact with anyone who can set them on the correct path. It's up to Haled, as the most gregarious of the group, to ferret out the information on how to get where they're supposed to be going. But, when he tells the cute girl at the information booth the name of the burg in question, she thinks he's named a like-sounding village - what a difference a vowel makes!

Haled (right) uses hands-on instructional techniques to coach Papi (center) in the ways of wooing.

Throughout the movie (which employs subtitles when Arabic or Hebrew is spoken), divergent cultures fall back on English as a de facto lingua franca; thus English prevails as the boys in the band converse with the residents of Dina's village, where they end up stranded for the night. Dina, insouciant and sexy in Guess jeans, offers to find places for the eight feckless characters to bed down, offering her own guest bedroom to Tawfiq and Haled. When she escorts the two martially-uniformed gentlemen up the stairs to her apartment, her nosy next-door neighbor gives them a lingering once-over.

It's during their evening spent in this outpost on the edge of nowhere, among families around the dinner table and young people out for a night on the town (such as it is), that the members of the displaced Egyptian police band discover how familiar are the aspirations, disappointments, joys and sorrows of their accommodating Israeli hosts. The most basic and meaningful human experiences transcend cultural differences, it seems.

Before the night is over, two of these three individuals will retire to the same bedroom.

While Haled plays Cyrano for a shy young Israeli named Papi (Shlomi Avraham), Dina attempts to break down the barriers which Tawfiq has arduously erected around himself; she senses in the crusty Lt. Col. a kindred spirit, and probably also considers him an interesting experiment - a challenge for her under-utilized charms. Though Tawfiq starts the evening as the coldest fish in cinematic dating history, Dina succeeds in penetrating his emotionally protective armor. Or at least battering it into pliability. The bittersweet resolution to their brief (and mostly internalized) romance is sad, beautiful and entirely practical.

The band does eventually reach the outpost to which they were originally dispatched, but their arrival and performance is anticlimactic; what they'll long remember about their trip to Israel is the little town that wasn't on their itinerary, and the people who they came to know there.

SPEAKING THE TRUTH: "It is very quiet here." - Haled to Dina. "It's dead." - Dina's reply

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• Arts > Movies / Film > Independent Films