RasoirJ on The Band's Visit

The Band’s Visit (2007) ****

How do you like the song “My Funny Valentine”? Your take on this quiet charmer of a comedy from Israel is likely to be directly related to whether you love or hate that melancholy masterpiece from Rodgers and Hart– let’s say, in the exquisitely down-tempo trumpet-solo version by Chet Baker.

The plot here kicks off with an old-fashioned Egyptian police band, faintly absurd in their grand powder-blue uniforms, which finds itself in Israel to play at the opening of an Arab cultural center. Problem is they wind up in the wrong village, a settlement as desolate as an Arizona truck stop. Forced to spend the night in a town with no hotel, the band’s eight members, experience a series of brief encounters built around the theme of love. Though everybody learns a little something, this is not a heartening film about cross-cultural communication, one of those “if only we understood each other better” movies. No, the theme is the core loneliness of humans, the longing for closeness and the inability to maintain it, a longing best embodied in music.

“Music is the shorthand of emotion,” Tolstoy said, and that could be the tag line for this film. Dina, a take-charge woman in her 40s well played by Israeli actress Ronit Elkabetz, runs the town’s one café. The central romance is her one-night pas de deux with the Egyptian band leader (Sasson Gabai), a gentleman of the old school, and a man of dignity, reserve, and constant sorrow. Gabai, blessed with an astonishing nose and a face that registers nuances of emotion without words, gives an understated yet indelible performance. Perhaps the greatest virtue of this promising first feature from writer-director Eran Kolirin is, in fact, its understatement.