Grace Note

...And so it is with Itzik, one of the men who hang out at Dina’s caf...

...But he gracefully covers the picture with his blue policeman’s hat...

...Fortunately for the audience watching The Band’s Visit, its writer-director’s polemical intent is overtaken by the movie’s droll and dry depiction of Egyptian strangers in a strange Israeli land and by the deadpan compassion with which it treats the gloomy circumstances in which its characters fi nd themselves...

...They end up, instead, in a town called Beit Ha-Tikva...

...BY JOHN PODHORETZ The one thing that can bring Jews and Arabs together is a desperate common need for an antidepressant...

...Ha-Tikva, which means “The Hope” in Hebrew, is the name of Israel’s national anthem...

...Hard-charging, dynamic, tough-minded Israel can be equated with Beit Ha-Tikva only if you think the setting of Waiting for Godot is actually the Fifth Arrondissement in Paris...

...Unaffected by his mistake, Haled sails through the predicament without worry—counseling a lonelyhearts Israeli misfi t in how to pick up a dour girl at the Beit Ha-Tikva roller disco, and doing his best to fi x up Tawfi q, the band’s leader, with the sexy, wounded Dina...

...When the band’s clarinetist plays eight or ten bars of a concerto he once began but never fi nished, Itzik tells him maybe he did complete it because the music evokes the “tons of loneliness” Itzik feels...

...That is the skirtchaser Haled, the band’s cellist, who is so busy trying to pick up the Israeli girl at the Tel Aviv bus station’s information desk that he gets the name of the town wrong...

...There is only one person in The Band’s Visit who isn’t a lost soul...

...But it’s also kind of nice, like a conversation you strike up on a train or plane with an amusing stranger who turns out to have a sad story to tell...

...That is the nature of the interactions in The Band’s Visit, in which people who come together for one night and will never see each other again fi nd it easy to share intimacies and bare their souls...

...There is no such place as Beit Ha-Tikva...

...The symbolic signifi cance suggests that Kolirin wants Beit Ha-Tikva to serve as a stand-in for all of Israel—lost in the desert, in the middle of nowhere, choking on dust and sand, living a pointless and absurd existence...

...As a geopolitical fairy tale, The Band’s Visit makes its mark as the Rodney King of motion pictures, Rodney King meets Barack Obama...

...There is talk in the Alexandria Police Department that they are going to shut the band down as a money-saving measure, and he does not want to give the talkers ammunition...

...Dina tells Tawfi q (as she does everything she can to get him into bed) that when she was a child all of Israel would gather to watch Egyptian movies on television on Friday afternoons: “I loved Omar Sharif,” she says...

...As allegory, The Band’s Visit is a ludicrous failure...

...Sound depressing...

...Writer-director Eran Kolirin presents it as a bleak, depressing outpost in the middle of nowhere: “No culture, no nothing,” as one of its downtrodden residents, a caf...

...Yes, we can...

...Tawfi q, a formal and elegant man in his fi fties, will not contact the Egyptian embassy in Tel Aviv for help because he is worried about his band’s future...

...The movie’s comic force comes from watching Tawfi q try, like a skinny Egyptian Oliver Hardy with a Buster Keaton stone face, to maintain his dignity as his dilemma grows ever more desperate...

...Needless to say, this Israeli movie, so openhearted and generous about the kindness and fellow feeling of Egyptians, has been banned in Egypt...

...Such is the theme of the celebrated new Israeli movie The Band’s Visit...

...manager named Dina, says bitterly in accented English to the leader of the Egyptian band...

...It turns out that he has made a hash of his life, as has she...

...Tawfi q’s stoic rigidity gives way as he fi nds his reserve melting under the gaze of the hungry Dina—though his response to her is not in the least erotic...

...The Band’s Visit is, kind of...

...Itzik takes three of the musicians back to his apartment to spend the night, only to be met with frosty hatred from his wife...

...The tale told here is about eight Egyptian musicians employed by the Alexandria Police Department who make a brief visit to Israel to play a concert at an Arab culture center in the town of Petah Tikva...

...John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic...

...There is a spirit of complete acceptance...

...An Israeli actor named Sasson Gabai gives an immensely touching performance in the role, which deepens as the movie progresses...

...She is not angry because they are Egyptian, but because he has been out of work for a year and she has lost all respect for him...

...Can’t we all just get along...

...Only once does one of the Egyptians show even a moment’s political discomfort, and that comes when he sees a picture of an Israeli standing triumphantly atop a tank (presumably an Egyptian tank during the Six Day War...

...The fact that these strangers are, on one side, Arabs and on the other, Jews, is never remarked upon...

...The sadness creeps up on you, but you don’t mind it so much because the stranger interests you...