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With an almost Seinfeldian shrug, the moving and funny The Band's Visit opens with a crawl that reads, "Once, not long ago, a small Egyptian police band arrived in Israel. Not many remember this ... it wasn't that important."
A movie about nothing, then, and everything. Eran Kolirin's insightful little film -- about a starched band of cop-musicians whose travel plans go awry, leaving them stranded for a night in a depressing little Israeli desert town -- is more than about what happens when ostensible enemies get to know each other. It's about the inevitability of effect when humans of any kind pass through each other's lives, however briefly.
More than 30 years have passed since Israel struck a cold truce with its most powerful enemy. Suspicion and worse clearly remains on both sides (this movie, a hit at Cannes, was banned from the Egyptian Film Festival).
And there's nothing in the faces or demeanour of the Alexandria Police Ceremonial Orchestra as they arrive in Tel Aviv airport that suggests they'll be easy to get to know. All dressed in identical powder-blue uniforms, following an expressionless Lieutenant-Colonel Tewfiq (Sasson Gabai) with a stereotypically male aversion to asking directions, they move like toy soldiers, with great purpose in precisely the wrong direction.
Even their reason for the visit, to play at the opening of an Arab Cultural Centre, suggests a separation from the country where their engagement is taking place.
The stoic ranks begin to break, however, when Khaled (Saleh Bakri) -- a young, handsome, natural womanizer with a penchant for Chet Baker -- spends too much time at a bus-ticket counter window serenading the staffer with his version of My Funny Valentine to make sure they're headed to the right city (they end up in Bet Hatikvah instead of Petah Tikva -- could happen to anybody).
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Literally lost in the desert, the band is, as they say, dependant on the kindness of strangers -- among them, Dina, the cynical, beautiful (and apparently once stunningly so) operator of a dusty diner, a young and sexually frustrated gas jockey named Papi (Schlomi Avraham) and various family members who agree to billet the lost Arabs with varying degrees of enthusiasm.
The permutations of chemistry are well woven in a movie so brief. Tewfiq and Dina trade tales of passions and tragedies almost by pantomime (English is the only language the Arabic and Hebrew-speaking characters have in common, a broken version thereof that comes with subtitles -- for this reason the movie was also robbed of a foreign-language Oscar nom).
The tension in a stilted family dinner is hilariously broken by an impromptu rendition of Gershwin's Summertime.
And Khaled gets to impart useful elementary advice about women to Papi in a hilarious night out at a roller disco (a scene where Papi sits, a depressed young woman on one side and "professor" Khaled on the other, amounts to uncommonly great physical comedy.)
Khaled's best moment, however, comes when the virginal Papi asks him to describe what it's like to have sex. Khaled can only express it in a stream of Arabic that begins -- "I am both love and the loved one ... "
It's one of many moments of outright poetry in The Band's Visit, one so date-melt-worthy you wonder why they released this movie a day late for Valentine's.
(This film is rated PG)