The Band's Visit

The Band’s Visit is an unassuming, sweet little film from Israel. It has been in the news lately for its disqualification for the Motion Picture Academy’s Foreign Language Film category. I am not sure that the movie is strong enough to be picked as a nominee, yet it is ironic that a movie very much about language and communication is shut out of the competition in that category.

Visit tells a story about a small Egyptian police band’s visit to Israel to perform at the inaugural ceremony of an Arab cultural center. The band is hopelessly lost in a desert Israeli town in the middle of nowhere. A sassy restaurant owner and her two customers take the men in for the night, and both sides discover that they have much in common despite their different background and religion.

The plotline is quite predictable. I think audiences can easily see that the Arabs and Jews in the picture will get along in the end, however, writer/director Eran Kolirin still manages to keep the situations and characters fresh, interesting and alive. Kolirin belongs to Jim Jarmusch’s school of filmmaking. There are many prolonged, purposefully awkward silence in the film to stress the characters’ discomfort, unfamiliarity and carefulness with each other. There are no big hilarious comic gags in the film; all the humor comes from realistic little moments such as the scenes in which three band members, with their Jewish hosts, sing off-key the American song Summertime, and in another instance, the stud in the band, Haled, tries to teach his Jewish friend how to woo a girl.

The acting in the film is superb. All the band members feel like non-professional actors because they all have that kind of originality and rawness amateur players are sometimes capable of bringing to a movie. The leader of the band, Colonel Tawfiq, is played beautifully by Sasson Gabai. The restaurant owner Dina is clearly attracted to him and his relationship with Dina in the film is touching and truthful. A less able filmmaker may have Tawfiq kiss Dina on the cheek or hug her at the end of their night, but not Kolirin. He keeps Tawfiq within his character and makes him consistent throughout the movie and that makes you love him and this movie even more.

The main problem I have with this film is the pacing. It is probably very slow by most audiences’ standards. I don’t want to sound like an advocate for constant action, but a film, in order to capture mass audiences’ attention, needs to have a faster pace. A few prolonged silent scenes are all fine, but having too many of them will only alienate some audience and lose its novelty factor.

A foreign movie always has a hard time attracting a large audience in this country. In this foreign picture, the characters speak English in over half of the screen time, so don’t be intimidated by the foreignness of its poster. It is a little delight to watch and you won’t have to read subtitles that often.