The Band’s Visit (2008)

Major plot points are described. Or at least implied.

There are occasionally romantic comedies that acknowledge the despair that fuels their existence. The cliché says we go to films for escape, and that might be most true of the romantic comedy. We want to be told that that can happen to us - it doesn’t matter if we’re single or married or dating - we want, at least sometimes, to be told that something above us can happen, that we can knock together and spark sparks. Romances are driven by loneliness of course, but they’re even more about a fantasy of self-actualization. Bukowski wrote something to the effect that a man doesn’t need love, he needs success in something, and that something can include love. Most romances aren’t just selling romances; they’re selling the notion of life deciding on its own accord to improve you. A longtime friend and I once called a certain variation of the romance the “asshole redemption fable”; recite the romances in your head and you’ll be surprised how many will fall into this category.

I don’t write this with any degree of self-righteousness, but as a sucker as stuck in the muck as anyone else, and as someone who appreciates the romantic movie brand of massage - provided the clichés are handled carefully. Few genres can sink so suddenly into tedium; few everyday failures are as embarrassing as the flat or obviously disingenuous romantic comedy. Sideways was deservedly applauded, but that picture is still essentially a fantasy - a lonely not-quite writer’s daydream of redemption, of a pretty, fairly undemanding girl coming along and refusing to allow him to talk her out of him – she excuses him. There’s a suspense to Sideways, particularly in that long, beautiful exchange between Paul Giamatti and Virginia Madsen in the middle - we dread the moment that Giamatti finally says something too pathetic, too self-loathing, and pokes the cloud he and the audience have been floating on.

The Band’s Visit is another such picture. Think Sideways by way of Jarmusch and you’re tonally close. Like Sideways, we watch The Band’s Visit with hesitation, sensing that Lt. Col. Tawfiq (Sasson Gabai) could, at any moment, say something just idiotic and closed-off enough to blow Dina (Ronit Elkabetz), the improbably collected, beautiful woman, away. Tawfiq is an Egyptian lost with his band in a small Israeli town. Dina is a woman who helps them out. Tawfiq, his face and body frozen in compliance to a non-existent command, his eyes tentative and melancholy, tries, more obviously desperately than he realizes, to exert control, over his band, himself, and, for a night, over Dina, who laughs his chivalry off and calls it out as the emotional cowardice it is. The Band’s Visit, remarkably, doesn’t sentimentalize Dina’s attraction to Tawfiq. Dina isn’t drawn to Tawfiq because she recognizes something deep and nocturnally decent in the man; he’s just another of her experiments, a prospective check mark in her internal book of dares.

Dina and Tawfiq are a classic kind of romantic movie mismatch – self-delusional in opposing-complimentary ways. Tawfiq is a tight-ass, seen by many of his band-mates as a laughable anachronism. Dina is the “free-spirit” who’s (perhaps) stuck herself in a public perception she no longer enjoys. The couple fence endlessly over the one night Tawfiq’s small band is stuck in town. The Band’s Visit is, like many films, about a woman who immediately invites a man into her bedroom, out of curiosity, out of a bit of pity, but who refuses to connect all the dots, she won’t compromise her pride that much, won’t chew his food for him – he has to make a tiny gesture – a leap of faith. In this case, another, younger, musician, Haled (Saleh Bakri), waits in the wings, free of the burden of taking things too seriously.

I’m in danger of making Eran Kolirin’s film sound more pained and labored than it actually is. The Band’s Visit has an appealing sense, beginning with the opening words, of perspective – it’s a modest picture that resists underlining its own modesty for false pathos. The other members of the band are barely defined, but Kolirin knows just when to cut to them for a brief comic beat to offset or accentuate the tremors between the couple. Kolirin stages the band of The Band’s Visit in consciously blocked poses that could be winking at our conceptions of these sorts of intimate comedies that almost always earn strong notices that are quickly regretted. Little Miss Sunshine also had these everyone-in-a-cute-direction compositions, and they highlighted the picture’s smug faux-indie-franchisitude. Kolirin, and this is where the Jarmusch influence figures, uses similar camera placements as a deflation of the emotion that a Little Miss Sunshine desperately trumps up – as an extra little roundabout flavor to the principle proceedings. The Band’s Visit really concerns one thing – a heartbreakingly casual missed opportunity, a potential memorable night reduced to a gesture – a wave of the hand – that’s destined to be over-sentimentalized in the imagination of the waver. Tawfiq, like many unhappy people, is resigned; he compensates for his unhappiness by striving for quiet, wounded dignity. Sadly, it rarely occurs to people like Tawfiq that it’s the dignity that spurs the unhappiness. The Band’s Visit promises yet another romantic odd-couple daydream, and pulls the rug out – it’s a romantic picture made for people who need romantic pictures, and it respects them and tweaks them in fair measure. Tawfiq is a poignant idiot – a man too clouded to take his clichéd movie express-train to brief fulfillment.

Posted on September 10th, 2008 in Reviews, Comedy, 2008 |

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