The Band's Visit
Written and directed by Eran Kolirin
Sony Pictures Classics
2008
Rating:


Wes Anderson is by far the most influential filmmaker of the past 10 years. While many Quentin Tarantino acolytes have popped up in the same time, except for Robert Rodriguez, all of them (Guy Ritchie, Paul McGuigan, Troy Duffy) have been dismissed. Meanwhile, those who have adopted Anderson's quirk and carefully composed, symmetrical cinematographic framing have gone on to acclaim ("Garden State," "Napoleon Dynamite," "Little Miss Sunshine," "Juno") and Oscar wins that Anderson himself has never received.

As with Tarantino's mimics, Anderson's imitators are dispiritingly superficial in their appropriation of his style. While it's easy to place a yellow bus in a frame or have a high school running team pass by at random moments, Anderson's films are never about the idiosyncrasy of the image for it sown sake. Films like "The Royal Tenenbaums" accumulate tiny, unassuming moments until they create a mosaic of surprising emotional force.

Without reducing gifted Israeli filmmaker Eran Kolirin to the level of hacks Jason Reitman or Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris (unlike them, Korlin is his own distinctive filmmaker), Kolirin's "The Band's Visit" is the first film to get the Anderson style completely right by combining eccentrically designed shots with poignancy. The comparison between the filmmakers seems apt. "The Band's Visit's" opening shot actually recalls one from "The Royal Tenenbaums": the arrival of Egypt's Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, dressed in blue uniforms, is reminiscent of the "These Days"-set sequence in which Richie (Luke Wilson) and Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) are reunited.

Stern Lt. Col. Tawfiq Zacharya (Sasson Gabai) and his orchestra arrive in Israel to play at the Arab Cultural Center in Petah Tikva. Facing cutbacks from the Egyptian police force, Tawfiq stubbornly insists the band fend for itself and try to find the small town where they're meant to play on their own. The band mistakenly ends up in the Jewish desert town of Beit Hatikva that has "no culture. Not Israeli culture, not Arab, no culture at all." With nowhere else to go, the band is kindly taken in by fierce restaurant owner Dina ("Late Marriage" star Ronit Elkabetz) and her unemployed patrons.

"The Band's Visit" is a comedy of manners that's a study in hilarious awkwardness comparable to "The Office." Most of the funniest moments come from the Egyptians and Israelis staring at each other in befuddlement as miscommunication drives a wedge between them. As a result, Kolirin's spatial compositions are about (mis)connection, not quirk.

What's most remarkable about the film is that it's obviously about Israeli-Arab relations, but it never explicitly addresses the tensions between the cultures. The blossoming friendship between Tawfiq and Dina reveals the common ground between the ethnicities, and all people really, in the human attributes of kindness, sorrow and hope.

Posted Saturday, February 9, 2008

Link to this review:
http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/bands.visit