Grace Note

The one thing that can bring Jews and Arabs together is a desperate common need for an antidepressant. Such is the theme of the celebrated new Israeli movie The Band’s Visit. The tale told here is about eight Egyptian musicians employed by the Alexandria Police Department who make a brief visit to Israel to play a concert at an Arab culture center in the town of Petah Tikva. They end up, instead, in a town called Beit Ha-Tikva.

Writer-director Eran Kolirin presents it as a bleak, depressing outpost in the middle of nowhere: “No culture, no nothing,” as one of its downtrodden residents, a café manager named Dina, says bitterly in accented English to the leader of the Egyptian band. There is no such place as Beit Ha-Tikva. Ha-Tikva, which means “The Hope” in Hebrew, is the name of Israel’s national anthem. The symbolic significance suggests that Kolirin wants Beit Ha-Tikva to serve as a stand-in for all of Israel–lost in the desert, in the middle of nowhere, choking on dust and sand, living a pointless and absurd existence.

As allegory, The Band’s Visit is a ludicrous failure. Hard-charging, dynamic, tough-minded Israel can be equated with Beit Ha-Tikva only if you think the setting of Waiting for Godot is actually the Fifth Arrondissement in Paris. Fortunately for the audience watching The Band’s Visit, its writer-director’s polemical intent is overtaken by the movie’s droll and dry depiction of Egyptian strangers in a strange Israeli land and by the deadpan compassion with which it treats the gloomy circumstances in which its characters find themselves.

There is only one person in The Band’s Visit who isn’t a lost soul. That is the skirt-chaser Haled, the band’s cellist, who is so busy trying to pick up the Israeli girl at the Tel Aviv bus station’s information desk that he gets the name of the town wrong. Unaffected by his mistake, Haled sails through the predicament without worry–counseling a lonelyhearts Israeli misfit in how to pick up a dour girl at the Beit Ha-Tikva roller disco, and doing his best to fix up Tawfiq, the band’s leader, with the sexy, wounded Dina.

Tawfiq, a formal and elegant man in his fifties, will not contact the Egyptian embassy in Tel Aviv for help because he is worried about his band’s future. There is talk in the Alexandria Police Department that they are going to shut the band down as a money-saving measure, and he does not want to give the talkers ammunition.

The movie’s comic force comes from watching Tawfiq try, like a skinny Egyptian Oliver Hardy with a Buster Keaton stone face, to maintain his dignity as his dilemma grows ever more desperate. An Israeli actor named Sasson Gabai gives an immensely touching performance in the role, which deepens as the movie progresses. Tawfiq’s stoic rigidity gives way as he finds his reserve melting under the gaze of the hungry Dina–though his response to her is not in the least erotic.

It turns out that he has made a hash of his life, as has she. And so it is with Itzik, one of the men who hang out at Dina’s café. Itzik takes three of the musicians back to his apartment to spend the night, only to be met with frosty hatred from his wife. She is not angry because they are Egyptian, but because he has been out of work for a year and she has lost all respect for him. When the band’s clarinetist plays eight or ten bars of a concerto he once began but never finished, Itzik tells him maybe he did complete it because the music evokes the “tons of loneliness” Itzik feels.

Sound depressing? The Band’s Visit is, kind of. But it’s also kind of nice, like a conversation you strike up on a train or plane with an amusing stranger who turns out to have a sad story to tell. The sadness creeps up on you, but you don’t mind it so much because the stranger interests you. That is the nature of the interactions in The Band’s Visit, in which people who come together for one night and will never see each other again find it easy to share intimacies and bare their souls.

The fact that these strangers are, on one side, Arabs and on the other, Jews, is never remarked upon. There is a spirit of complete acceptance. Dina tells Tawfiq (as she does everything she can to get him into bed) that when she was a child all of Israel would gather to watch Egyptian movies on television on Friday afternoons: “I loved Omar Sharif,” she says. Only once does one of the Egyptians show even a moment’s political discomfort, and that comes when he sees a picture of an Israeli standing triumphantly atop a tank (presumably an Egyptian tank during the Six Day War). But he gracefully covers the picture with his blue policeman’s hat.

As a geopolitical fairy tale, The Band’s Visit makes its mark as the Rodney King of motion pictures, Rodney King meets Barack Obama. Can’t we all just get along? Yes, we can. Needless to say, this Israeli movie, so open-hearted and generous about the kindness and fellow feeling of Egyptians, has been banned in Egypt.

John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.