The Band's Visit (July August Productions, Bleiberg Entertainment, Sophie Dulac Productions, Israel Film Fund, Keshet Broadcasting, Yes, Sony Pictures Classics, 2007)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, June 13) I watched a quite fascinating film on Turner Classic Movies: The Band’s Visit, a 2007 production from Israeli writer-director Eran Kolirin about an eight-piece Egyptian band called the Alexandria Police Ceremonial Orchestra who receive an invitation to perform at an Arab cultural center inside Israel. They’re supposed to be performing in Petah Tikva, but because the “p” sound doesn’t exist in Arabic they end up instead in the Israeli town of Beit Hatikva, where there is only a roadside diner for them to eat at and nowhere for them to stay. The band is led by lieutenant colonel Tawfiq Zacharya (Sasson Gabai), a widower whose one child, a son, killed himself as a young adult, which led to his wife losing her will to live and also dying too soon. The roadside diner is owned by an Israeli woman named Dina (Ronit Elkabetz), who takes pity on them and sets up places for them to spend the night. She invites Tawfiq and another band member to sleep in her apartment, while the others end up with a friend of hers or sleeping in the restaurant itself. It’s a hard movie to describe because Kolirin’s plot is simply a sequence of incidents in which the various band members befriend their Israeli hosts and get to know them better. Among the band members is a young clarinetist who’s started composing an “overture to a concerto” with himself as soloist; he hasn’t got any farther than the first few minutes but he (or his orchestra double) plays a quite haunting theme, allegedly from it, on the soundtrack. Another one has the title of major general (remember that the musicians are actually police officers in their day jobs and music is strictly an avocation) and is the band’s conductor, to the extent it ever has (or needs) one.

There’s a lot of sexual tension in the air, and Dina is depicted in a surprisingly sexually explicit way. We get plenty of shots of her crotch, tightly enclosed in ultra-sexy blue jeans, and a few back views of her ass similarly encased. One (this one, anyway) gets the impression that she’s still a woman of enormous sexuality and she’s frustrated that she’s got no one to express it with – though Tawfiq and Dina end up going out together to a dance club and ultimately go back to her place and get it on. In between there are a number of genuinely charming scenes, in which a young Israeli man who’s been waiting for his girlfriend to call literally for days suddenly sees the Egyptian band musicians usurping the phone on which he’s expecting her call. (The Band’s Visit obviously takes place before cell phones came to the Middle East en masse.) The message of The Band’s Visit is of course that all humans are brothers and sisters under the skin and that artificial barriers like the one between Israel and Egypt just arbitrarily divide people for no good reason. The film is evenly divided between people speaking Hebrew, Arabic and English; in fact, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences refused to allow it to be nominated for “Best Foreign-Language Film” since over 50 percent of the dialogue is in English. Since the Egyptian characters don’t speak Hebrew and the Israelis don’t speak Arabic, they frequently fall back on English as their lingua franca – evidence that the dominance of the U.S. politically, economically and culturally has made English much of the world’s second language. (More recently the Academy has tweaked the rules for that category and now calls it “Best International Film,” so under 2024 rules The Band’s Visit would have been eligible for the award.)

The Band’s Visit is an engaging testament to the idea that human emotions are universal and even people who have so long conditioned themselves to hate each other as Israelis and Arabs are all pretty much brothers and sisters under the skin. One thing Kolirin did to emphasize that point was run the opening and closing titles in both Hebrew and Arabic, and it’s been pointed out many times that the word for “peace” is virtually the same in both languages – “shalom” in Hebrew and “salaam” in Arabic. The success of this movie in communicating the commonalities of people is displayed by the sheer number of awards the world over it did win, and the equivalent success of a 2017 stage musical adaptation featuring Arab-American stars like Tony Shalhoub, which opened off-off-Broadway, finally made it to Broadway and swept that year’s Tony Awards. The lesson of togetherness is one people in that part of the world quite badly need to re-learn these days after the brutal attack on Israel on October 6, 2023 by the Palestinian militants of Hamas, and Israel’s genocidal response.