The Band's Visit movie review (2008)
They are in the middle of the Israeli desert, having taken the wrong bus to the wrong destination. Another bus will not come until tomorrow. “The Band’s Visit” begins with this premise, which could supply the makings of a comedy, and turns into a quiet, sympathetic film about the loneliness that surrounds us. Oh, and there is some comedy, after all.
The town they have arrived at is lacking in interest even for those who live there. It is seemingly without activity. The bandleader, named Tewfiq (Sasson Gabai), asks if there is a hotel. The woman, Dina (Ronit Elkabetz), is amused. No hotel.
They communicate in careful, correct English; she more fluent, he weighing every word. Tewfiq explains their dilemma.
They are to play a concert tomorrow at the opening of a new Arab cultural center in a place has that almost, but not quite, the same name as the place they are in.
Tewfiq starts out to lead a march down the highway in the correct direction. There is some dissent, especially from the tall young troublemaker Haled (Saleh Bakri). He complains that they have not eaten. After some awkward negotiations (they have little Israeli currency), the Egyptians are served soup and bread in Dina’s cafe. It is strange, how the static, barren, lifeless nature of the town seeps into the picture, even though the writer-director Eran Kolirin uses no establishing shots or any effort at all to show us anything beyond the cafe — and later, Dina’s apartment and an almost empty restaurant.
Dina offers to put up Tewfiq and Haled at her apartment, and tells the young layabouts (who seem permanently anchored to their chairs outside her cafe) that they must take the others home to their families. And then begins a long, quiet night of guarded revelations, shared isolation and tentative tenderness. Dina is tough but not invulnerable. Life has given her little that she hoped for. Tewfiq is a man with an invisible psychic weight on his shoulders. Haled, under everything, is an awkward kid. They go for a snack at the restaurant, its barren tables reaching away under bright lights, and Dina points out a man who comes in with his family. A sometime lover of hers, she tells Tewfiq. Even adultery seems weary here.
