The Band's Visit

The Band's Visit begins with intertitles that say: "An Egyptian Police Band got lost in Israel overnight. . . . It was not very important." I'm not sure if this was an attempt to lower expectations, but it certainly did explain what this movie is about. It's a small movie. A microcosm that doesn't concern itself with the outside world. It's not about international politics, even though it could be given the mixture of Arabic and Hebrew and English that the movie contends with. It's not a grand love story or an action-packed spy story. And therein lies its beauty -- by not trying to do too much, the movie excels in what it does do.

There's not much more to the plot than that first sentence. It's about a group of Eygyptian policemen who end up in the middle of nowhere in Israel and have to spend the night because they can't get the next train until the morning. And there are no hotels, so they spend the night with a restaurant owner and her friends. Their lives change because of the night, but not too much, and they affect the lives of the Israeli townspeople they meet, but not too much.

This setup allows for some lovely character exploration, and the actors here are quite frankly amazing: normal, nuanced, full of pathos but not pathetic, and funny. In other words, they'd never make it in Hollywood (also, they're just not good looking enough). Basically all I want to do in this review is related different scenes -- how the very conservative, reserved leader of the police band spends the evening "out on the town" with a free-spirited and direct Israeli woman. Neither of them changes, and they don't become friends, but by the end of the movie he poignantly sees the other person as an opportunity missed -- someone who might have changed his life if only he had been a different person. Then there's the group of men who spend the night at the house of a young married man, and the men end up singing American jazz songs together. The youngest band member decides to hang out with a young Israeli man and helps him pick up a girl in what is my new favorite scene in any movie ever. It's just so funny without using any words. Trust me, it's worth seeing the whole movie just for that moment.

I'm at a loss to sum up the movie. I feel I can't really do it justice by describing it, so I will end with a paraphrase of a bit of dialogue that I think the writers meant to sum up the movie for themselves. One of the band members plays the clarinet, and starting composing a concerto but only has a few melancholic bars written. He plays them several times in the movie, but he says he never finished it because he didn't know how it ended and he got sidetracked by life. In this scene, he is sitting next to the crib of his host's baby. The band member sings the melody to the baby, and the host says, "Maybe this is how you concerto ends. Not with a symphonic crash and triumphant finish, but with with a baby in a crib in a simple room with no decorations on the walls." Sometimes the small bare film is more beautiful than the most ornate and complex movie one could come up with.

3.5 stars