The Band’s Visit is a charming and tender meditation on loneliness and the essential need for human connection. Rife with comic irony, the film uses the Middle Eastern desertscapes of Israel as a vast, beige metaphor for personal isolation and emotional seclusion.

Egypt’s Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra has come to Israel to perform at the opening of an Arab Cultural Center. Bound for the town of Petach Tikva, an unintentional pronunciation error lands them instead in Beit Hatikva, a rundown town in the middle of nowhere. Looking like lost children in military uniforms, the band appear as tiny figures lost against a sea of sand and adrift on a desolate landscape.

There is no Arab Cultural Center in Beit Hatikva. According to the beautiful but brash Dina (Ronit Elkabetz), operator of a local café where the tired and hungry band members seek shelter, the town has “no Arab culture, no Israeli culture, no culture of any kind.” Stranded overnight, the band’s only hope is to catch a bus the following morning and try to make it to their intended destination in time for their concert.

Dina talks the group’s stiff-backed leader, Tewfiq (Sasson Gabai) into letting the group stay the night — it’s not as if he has much choice. Tewfig and the handsome violinist, Khaled (Saleh Bakri), stay with her, while the other men are put up in the home of Itzik (Rubi Moscovich), one of the café’s patrons. Over the course of the evening, the bored-with-life Dina and Tewfiq, for whom the ghosts of the past are lifelong companions, bond; Khaled plays an Arabic Cyrano de Bergerac to help hapless local Papi (Shlomi Avraham) come out of his sexual hibernation and find love; and the rest of the band members find themselves uncomfortably caught up in a less-than-perfect domestic situation.

The Band’s Visit is a subtle, sincere and humane film that, in its own small way, uses understated humor to try and cross the exceptionally complex cultural divide that splits the Middle East in two. This is a film of uncomfortable, awkward proximity. Though there is nothing approaching outright hostility between the Arabs and Jews in the film, it does not mask the subterranean anxiety felt by both sides.

A political tale that refuses to trade sweet whimsy for cold methodology, The Band’s Visit has a very simple, but no less profound, message: it is a big, often scary world out there and we should never balk when love, in any degree or guise, comes calling.

Blending comedy and drama with just the right amount of quirky poignancy, The Band’s Visit is funny, melancholy and beautiful all at once.

NOTE: As an indicator of the The Band’s Visit’s esteem, the film was chosen as Israel’s official submission to the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film, but was disqualified because more than 50% of its dialogue is in English.

© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.