MARCH 14, 2008 - VOL. 1, ISSUE 6

The Band's Visit is a quiet film, set in an arid nowhere, about music and the ocean. In its 87 minutes, there are only the sparest snippets of melody, and only the desolate sights of Israel's Negev Desert. It is a world seemingly incompatible with people, life, and art, but what takes place is so delicately human and touching it might take you by surprise.

In the middle of this desert is a small town, Bet Hatikva, and in the town are people who live plain lives, like restaurateur Dina, played by Ronit Elkabetz, and her two regular customers. Traveling by bus, the aged Colonel Tawfiq Zacharya, played by Sasson Gabai, arrives as the leader of a seven-piece police orchestra, his ragged troops standing against the brown dirt in brilliant, impossibly starched blue uniforms. From Alexandria, Egypt, they have been misdirected at the airport and end up in the wrong Israeli town on their way to play at the opening of an "Arab cultural center."

Tawfiq's uneasy inventory of Bet Hatikva from the side of a distant road is illustrated in restrained visual style. Shots of the desert, the orchestra, the featureless buildings of the town, and the colonel's pained face are presented in orderly, rigidly-framed, deliberate succession, bringing to mind a sort of Israeli Wes Anderson aesthetic.

When Dina greets the mislaid band at the door of her restaurant, the group is framed rigidly as they stand in an orderly line in the street, silent. Their wonderful uniforms are probably their most dignified asset, at this point, for, despite Tawfiq's insistence on perfection, decorum, and hierarchy, the men these suits cover are slumped, unimpressive, mostly old, and clearly marginalized. Aside from Tawfiq's regal face and impeccable posture, the only other band members who stand out are the wimpy second-in-command Camal, played by Imad Jabarin, and the young, handsome, and hopelessly flirtatious Khaled, played by Saleh Bakri.

We get settled in for the story once the troops complain over traveling too much and Tawfiq is forced to ask Dina for a place to sleep for the night. The band's resources are thin; they are clearly not the Alexandria police force's top priority. Tawfiq and Khaled go to Dina's apartment, while Camal takes the rest of the group to Dina's friend's house.

The rest of the night is the type of human activity that reveals more about character than anything else we do: killing time. The town is clearly dying, dead, and buried, and what people do in that situation is delightfully compelling schadenfreude. Camal plays a few seconds of an unfinished concerto on clarinet for his host and his dissatisfied wife, a furtive vocalization of the lieutenant's modest but always denied aspirations within the police band. Khaled, desperate for the kind of contemporary fraternity that his bandmates can't provide him, invites himself out for a night on the town with the awkward, dorky Papi, played by Shlomi Avraham. At the town's disco roller rink (yes), Khaled, in his uniform, tells Papi in beautiful but disingenuous Arabic of the mysterious wonder of love, and affectionately guides the boy in making the first few moves on his date.

The crux of the story lies in Tawfiq's time with Dina. Dina is a strong, outspoken woman—too strong and vibrant for tiny Bet Hatikva. Every move she makes is full of force and elegance, and she is clearly a match for Tawfiq's stoic tact. She puts on a very pretty dress, probably her best, to take Tawfiq "out on the town"; even if it's just to a crappy diner and the paved town park. She does her best to draw her guest of his shell, perhaps in a gentle attempt to inject some fleeting novelty in her life.

Tourist or traveler? Taking the screwy, fish-out-of-water approach to this story may have been tempting; it's an alluringly stark culture-clash situation. Tourists, when abroad, hold on to their national identity (no matter how arbitrary) and flaunt it in all situations—"how is this different from home?" Bikur Ha-Tizmoret is more of a weary, wandering expat, having seen so many places that any differences are whittled down smooth. The coexistence of Arab and Israeli culture, In Our World Today, is a Big Issue, but this film is too clever to get distracted much by that. Although neither Jerusalem nor any of Egypt are given any glimpses, the characters wear their countries like old, comfortable clothes, and we get just enough of the distinctions and similarities to understand these people. It's nothing as crude as Us and Them, or Here and There, but a dignified comprehension of shared humanity.

This film is about music, and the ocean. It's probably the quietest, least dulcet film ever made about music, and not a single body of water is featured or even mentioned. The music is in the silences, and the ocean sits in orphic blue uniforms. It's a surprise when Tawfiq reveals what pain lies beneath his weathered visage. It's unexpected when the philandering Khaled finds something tender outside himself. It's a sweet revelation when Camal finds the end to his gentle concerto from the most innocuous source, in an infant's bedroom. In the end, when everything starts to fall back, gently, to normal—Khaled finds someone to sleep with, Camal settles into his number two spot, and Tawfiq raises his hands high in the blue sky to conduct the band at the cultural center—is when the first full melody we hear begins. It alludes beautifully to the silent loneliness of the film, and contains within it more sincerity than an entire movie full of music could have.