'The Band's Visit'

Waiting for the 472 to Beit Hatikva


"Do you like Chet Baker?"

The Alexandrian Police ceremonial band finds itself stranded until morning in a small Israeli town which suffers remoteness and council estate architecture, without a connection onwards to their concert booking. Circumstances compel the band members to remain as guests and 'The Band's Visit' shows the encounter the band and some of the people in the town experience over the night of their stay. Tewfiq (Sasson Gabai) is an ageing authoritarian and the band's conductor, Khaled (Saleh Bakri) a young Casanova type who plays violin but prefers the trumpet, and Dina (Ronit Elkabetz) is the dry-witted proprietress of the cafe who forms a kind of friendship with Tewfiq.

Khaled is taken to the best available entertainment for young people in the town, a roller disco where in a bladder-threateningly funny scene the visitor teaches his host how to approach girls, and they both conspicuously fail to roller skate. Dina takes Tewfiq to the equivalent for older people, a restaurant and supermarket, and later the park, much of the amenity of which is imaginary. Other members of the band have dinner with a local family and bond tentatively over jazz. There are visual jokes that resemble fragments of Tati, and plenty of humour in the dialogue, which mostly uses English as a lingua franca, with occasional discursions into Hebrew and Arabic to let hosts and guests communicate directly, aside from each other.

'The Band's Visit' never quite mentions the situation, the context - it's assumed that the viewer will know enough about this to hear all the resonances, feel some of the awkwardnesses for the characters. One of the band discreetly places his cap over the picture of a 1967 era tank hanging above his table in the cafe; Dina recalls a time when the streets in Israeli towns would clear as the population would watch the Friday afternoon Arab movie on television, though without elaborating on why this scheduling fell from popularity. Yet if we thought the two nations were thoroughly amicable neighbours the body of this film would be much the same, discords among hosts and band respectively, affinities and shared hopes and experiences discovered by the two groups together. There's something perfectly rueful and tender about Tewfiq and Dina's conversations. It's a film about small-town life, music, people who are different and the same.


"Arab Cultural Centre? There's no Arab Cultural Centre here. No Arab culture, no Hebrew culture, no culture at all. This is nowhere."


At the roller disco.

"Why the police need to play Um Kulthoum?""That is like asking why a man needs a soul."

The Band's Visit (Bikur Ha-Tizmoret), Dir: Eran Kolirin (2007)http://www.thebandsvisit.com/