There is no culture here…

There’s a moment in The Band’s Visit which is painful to sit through; it’s what gives this film traction and lifts it above the general run of the mill cross cultural films. Three Egyptian men in blue uniform are jammed around a dining table with four Israelis. They have gate-crashed a birthday and they are definitely not welcome. In a less interesting film the discussion of music would establish a connection between these disparate individuals. Instead, the conversation goes nowhere. We become aware that the connection even between band members is at best tenuous, let alone the possibilities of connecting across cultures with long-standing issues. The connection between the Israeli couple is fraught and angry; it hints at the despair of long-term unemployment. Their happy wedding photo belies the present loneliness of both individuals. And yet the film is only momentarily about their story. Much of the dialogue takes place in English; a second language for both cultures which creates a further level of stilted alienation.

The film maker, Eran Korilin, said in an interview on At the Movies, "I wanted also the film to have these aesthetics where you would have a very strict and disciplined shooting and cutting but maybe you would feel underneath that there is something pounding, you know, beneath." Something pounding beneath - what an ambition and a phrase.

The band is stranded in the wrong small town in Israel. Their intended destination is Petah Tikwa. My friend Jindra says that this translates as ‘Opening of Hope’. Instead, they are in a fictional town called Beit Hativka; which might well be called “Departure of Hope’ or “Hopelessness”. It is a town perched in the middle of a white sandy desert, its new sparseness accentuated by the empty roads and colonnade of light poles stretching out to nowhere. The director, Korilin, emphasises the surreal nature of the landscape by positioning the band in tight geometric formation, their uniforms very blue against the overexposed grey of the sky. Life there is dismal; as Dina, the café owner points out ”Culture, there is no culture here, no Arab, no Israeli, no culture at all…” It is a town entirely at odds with my experience of the Middle East though the spare desert scenes were like many I saw in Jordan and some in Syria. The setting conveys the same sort of desolation that I feel in new outer-suburban parts of Melbourne. Part of it is the lack of life on the streets and the sense of disconnection that people have from each other.

There is much more to say about this film. It is a fragment of a story but I was engrossed in it. The director avoided both predictability and sentimentality, with the exception of the concerto sub-theme. In its exploration of the loneliness of many of the individuals, it is touching without being sentimental. I could write much more about the two main characters, Dina and Tawfiq, created by actors who both know how to fill a screen.

Wikipedia says that The Band's Visit was Israel's original Foreign Language Film submission for the 80th Academy Awards but was rejected by the Academy because it contained over 50% English dialogue. Thus, Israel sent Beaufort instead; Beaufort was finally included in the five final nominees. I saw Beaufort last year at MIFF; it is a very good film which is also about loneliness and despair against a fairly bleak backdrop. It was rumored, according to Wikipedia, that it was the filmmakers of Beaufort who brought to the Academy's attention the ineligibility, on language grounds, of The Band's Visit. Beaufort's makers denied this rumor. Is it better than The Band’s Visit? Different beasts!