The Hindu Business Line : Band members shun stoic image, play with new found spirit

Mumbai, Sept. 12 When the Alexandria Police Ceremonial Orchestra arrives in Israel, you’d expect either an officially sponsored, and therefore, forced hearty welcome or a hostile reception, black flags, “Go back” signs and all. You’d never expect — indifference.

The all-male seven member band, ram-rod stiff musicians in formation facing the camera in powder blue uniforms with epaulettes peak caps, a picture of military precision blunted by the soft blue of their tunics, waits in silence. They wait in vain for a bus to take them to Beth Hatikva, desert settlement and its Arab Cultural Center.

Tewfiq Zakaria, the band conductor shows no impatience at this unsettling experience, marooned in an alien country, with little Israeli money. He sends Haled, the youngest and disgruntled violinist, to make enquiries.

The comedy of errors has begun; they board a bus, worried but in silence, and are deposited on the edge of a town, their powder blue contrasting with the stark desert landscape, the silence broken by the wheels of their trolley bags on the empty asphalt pavement leading to the drab dreary town off the highway stretching to nowhere.

You guess it before Tewfiq approaches what will be the centre point of their encounter with the Israelis; a restaurant and the young owner, Dina and her two friends, Itzhik and Papi. She tells them they are in the wrong town, Haled got it wrong at the airport, mistaking the alphabet P for B.

What follows is an encounter between two apparently opposing and antagonistic cultures, what the late Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, called, the “struggle between two memories” that has torn the Middle East for decades. But The Band’s Visit, by first time Israeli writer-director Eran Kolirin, offers no message either confrontational or conciliatory.

It is a story of half a day and a night that the disciplined, Egyptian musicians in their uniforms and their peak caps glued to their heads spend with three young Israelis, stuck in a small village in the middle of a desert where nothing happens.

As Dina, the young restaurant owner who befriends a very reluctant Tewfiq and his men observes wryly when asked about the Arab Cultural Center, “There is no Arab Center! No Arab culture, no Israeli culture; no culture at all” Papi mutters: “Bloody nowhere.”

This is a comedy of manners, a slow paced slyly humorous take on how easily two apparently hostile people can warm to each other in ways none could have imagined in their wildest dreams. For the lonely Tewfiq the band is all; a widower, he hides his grief and guilt and emotional contact of any kind but he cracks, just a little, under Dina’s gentle and insistent jabs at his stiffness but cannot let himself follow her where she, in her own loneliness, would like to lead him.

When the band musicians are divided among Dina and her two young friends for the night since the only bus arrives the next morning, she takes Tewfiq and, reluctantly, handsome Haled to her small apartment.

Simon, the second in command and two others are taken home to his family by Itzhik to a pregnant and surly wife and another couple sharing the flat; the rest spend the night at the restaurant with Papi. Simon gets a taste of desert town domestic tension.

One of the most poignant moments, the thematic pivot almost of the film, comes in the small room Simon will share with a baby.

Itzhik, the father and the man who had heard Simon play a brief snatch of his own unfinished concerto that afternoon, enters to make sure his guest is comfortable, then tells him how his concerto must end.

“Not a big end with trumpets and violin, not sad nor happy, just a small room, a child asleep and tonnes of loneliness.”

Like bubbles rising to the surface of a deep pond, every encounter provokes some hidden facet that surfaces with no warning from dark depths, like Itzhak’s confession of loneliness,

Tewfiq’s love of Chet Baker, the great jazz trumpeter, Dina’s attraction, not to the handsome and restless Haled, but the taciturn Tewfiq, old enough to be her father in whom she sees Arab music, Omar Sharif and perhaps, a lost youth.

Haled’s obvious rakish ways that translate into a gentle crash course in seduction as a stiff Papi is unable to make the first move in a discotheque where dispirited young couples gyrate.

With tiny gestures that mark one of the high comic and poignant vignettes of this film, Haled silently eases Papi into adulthood in less than three minutes.

The next morning, the band leaves Dina and her friends, Tewfiq, the “General” allows a smile to slip through, as he gestures his band to wave goodbye at the three youngsters in hip dress condemned to this monochromatic desert landscape of stillness.

The narrative is thin, nothing happens, tensions do not resolve in love or hate; but Dina waves farewell a little wistfully and Tewfiq sings and his band plays at the right venue with a new found spirit. Memories, you’d like to think will keep them united.

The Band’s Visit is an Israeli production with the ravishing Ronit Elkabetz as Dina, Sasson Gabai as Tewfiq and the Palestinian actor Saleh Bakri as Haled. It was Israel’s submission for the Oscar in the Best Foreign Language film category but the use of more than 50 per cent English eliminated it.

While the band members and the Israelis speak their native tongues among themselves, they communicate in heavily accented and broken English that adds richly to the humour.

But like in all good comedy, the small gesture and silences lend a comic touch laced with poignancy. The Band’s Visit is available on Sony Pictures Classics DVD.