The Band's Visit

Rating:

* * * *

Verdict:

Small and utterly charming comedy is one of the best of the year.

For those familiar with the nuances of life in the Middle East, this winsome, winning film will be rich in small, telling ironies. But an overarching one is this: the main actor, Sasson Gabai, an Israeli Jew, plays an Egyptian, adrift in Israel and struggling to bridge the gulf that separates him from his hosts.

It's a resonant piece of casting in a film full of resonances large and small, but what's nicest about this debut for writer-director Eran Kolirin is that its symbolic echoes are, like the film itself, small, delicate and unassuming. Watching these characters, you can believe in speakers of Arabic and Hebrew understanding each other perfectly: their command of English may be superficial, but they are capable of a respect for each other's simple humanity that is ocean-deep.

The band of the title is the Alexandria Ceremonial Orchestra, which comes to Israel to perform at the opening of an Arab Cultural Centre. Things go awry from the first scene, when we meet them in their comical baby-blue uniforms, waiting at the airport for a ride that never comes. Their leader, Lieutenant Colonel Tewfiq Zacharya (Gabai) is unfazed. "This band has managed on its own for 25 years," he tells his anxious charges. "I have no intention of changing that."

He finds out what bus to catch to their destination, but they end up at a place whose name differs by a single consonant. "No Arab cultural centre?" he asks Dina (Elkabetz), who runs the small town's only business, a cafe; "No Arab culture," she says, "no Israeli culture, no culture at all."

What unfolds in the course of the next hour, as Dina and the townsfolk take the lost travellers in, is a gentle, wistful comedy that redefines the meaning of the word "deadpan". The comic collision between the casual mores of the small settlement and Tewfiq's sense of decorum is sweetly hilarious. He, of course, is trebly uptight: a military policeman, a Muslim and the leader of an expedition that must give a good account of itself to the outside world. And Kolirin ups the ante by having the orchestra threatened with extinction because of budget cuts back home. But forced to rely on the kindness of strangers as different from him as can be imagined, Tewfiq has to peel away the shield that hides him from the world.

The film abounds in beautifully observed set pieces - a lesson in seduction being the best of them - but its irresistible appeal derives from its understatement and effortlessness. When people stop trying, magic happens: there's a symbolic significance to that, too, that scarcely needs underlining.

Peter Calder

Cast:

Sasson Gabai, Ronit Elkabetz, Saleh Bakri, Khalifa Natour, Imad Jabarin

Director:

Eran Kolirin

Running time:

87 mins

Rating:

(M low level offensive language). In Arabic, English and Hebrew with English subtitles

Screening:

Berkeley Takapuna, Lido, Rialto