It bursts with emotional music.By John DeSando, WCBE's It's Movie Time
"The still, sad music of humanity" Wordsworth
The Band's Visit is a gloriously minimalist concerto of a European film, a serious Seinfeld "about nothing" so filled with something it bursts with emotional music barely played.
An Egyptian ceremonial police-force band is stranded in a small Israeli town as it makes its way to at the inauguration of an Arab arts center. The little relationships that develop from the restaurant the small band spend the night at with a darkly beautiful proprietress, Dina (Ronit Elkabetz), are the emotional core of this song of love and loneliness. With the exception of the beautiful woman, most of the characters, band and customers, are reaching out for love but finding it seductive yet elusive. One band member, who has served as an assistant to the conductor, Lt. Colonel Tawfig Zacharya, cannot finish a concerto he has been working on for those years until a cradled baby inspires him, taking the Israeli dad's advice to end it small, like the bedroom, with "tons of loneliness."
You might think the film exists to figuratively express the Arab-Israeli conflict, but The Band's Visit is much more about the challenges of human sympathy and memory, not resolved but advanced a bit by the revelations in the long night of longing in a roller rink, imaginative park, and dingy restaurant. That Tawfig struggles with Dina's advances serves not as and indictment of his crushing introversion as much as it is an opportunity to reveal the source of his self-inflicted emotional exile.
I am reminded of the tender affinity artists have for lonely characters?just so for The Band's Visit, where Melville's Bartleby has not the same redemptive experience as the band members:
"Ah, Bartleby! Ah, Humanity!"
John DeSando teaches film at Franklin University and co-hosts WCBE 90.5's It's Movie Time, which can be heard streaming at www.wcbe.org Fridays at 3:01 pm and 8:01 pm and on demand anytime. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.RR.com