A fan favourite at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, Eran Kolirin’s unassuming debut, The Band’s Visit, dispenses with culture critiques and ideologies in lieu of a good-natured set of episodes about stilted romances and mediocre comic riffs.

Ironically, mediocrity is exactly the thing Lieutenant Colonel Tawfiq (Sasson Gabai) is trying to avoid as he makes his way to Israel with the Alexandria Ceremonial Orchestra, a small policemen’s orchestra from Egypt. Khaled (Saleh Bakri), his violinist, can’t stop asking girls if they have heard of Chet Baker, a nuisance which Tawfiq blames for his band getting on a bus to Bet Hatikva instead of Petah Tikva. The minute they step off the bus in Hatikva, it becomes crushingly apparent that they are on the sunny side of nowhere. A local café owner, Dina (Ronit Elkabetz), feeds the band and arranges for sleeping arrangements until the bus arrives the following day.

Kolirin, with a delicate hand, orchestrates three nocturnal sonatas involving members of the band and local residents. Dina, feisty and fertile, invites Tawfiq out for some dinner and a late-night stroll. On the other side of town, Khaled is out at a roller-disco with Dina’s friend Papi (Shlomi Avraham) and the most dreadfully gloomy date of all time. Elsewhere, the clarinet player ruminates on his unfinished concerto with a dysfunctional Israeli family.

Just as romance seems in-reach for Dina and Tawfiq over talk of Omar Sharif movies, Khaled returns and grabs an abrupt quickie with Dina before the band heads to Petah Tikva in the morning. It is at the very moment Tawfiq awakes to see his violinist fiddling Dina through a crack in her door that the weight of the conductor’s grief is felt. Played with superb gravitas by Gabai, Tawfiq at once awakens a more elegant flame in Dina’s burner while slowly peeling away his own monumental losses; the smothering of a desire that seems to only come alive when he is conducting his men.

Though Gabai is supremely effective and Bakri holds his own, the film builds most amply on the wild-eyed Elkabetz, best known as the divorced woman in Dover Koshashvili’s exceptional Late Marriage. Dina is at heart a terminally lonely woman who knows how to disguise her wounds with eccentricities. It is the stuff of over-baked melodrama, but Elkabetz plays it so subtly and fluidly that you forget you’ve seen the character a thousand times before.
Compositionally acute, The Band’s Visit’s agreeability belies its pointless end result. Where Gabai and Elkabetz strive to give the material some irregular beats, Kolirin’s meandering script and his inability to muster any original ideas, leave the film just a few notches left of that mediocrity the Lieutenant Colonel was so intent on diverting.

Chris Cabin