The Band's Visit

The Band’s Visit started a one-week Oscar qualifying run in New York and Los Angeles yesterday, before getting a wider release in February. In Israel the movie won eight Ophir awards The Israeli Academy award) and received a whole bunch of headlines when it got picked up by Sony Pictures Classics and then dumped by the the AMPAS and the the HFPA for having too much English dialog to compete as a foreign language film. Most recently the European Film Awards gave the movie two prizes, The Independent Spirit Awards nominated it for Best Foreign Film and the NBR included it as one of the top six foreign films of 2007. All in all, this seems to be on track to becoming the best reviewed Israeli film since the Seventies and is on track to be the best performing Israeli film at the American box office ever.
Over at GreenCine David Hudson compiled the reviews for The Band’s Visit, some of them overwhelmingly glowing, from the top critics on both coasts.

MANOHLA DARGIS for The New York Times:

Strangers in a Land That’s Not So Strange

Ms. Dargis, like many reviewers in the States as well in Israel, likes The Band’s Visit, even though it sometimes boasts a limited filmic vocabulary:

“The Band’s Visit,” the first feature by the Israeli writer and director Eran Kolirin, flirts recklessly with obviousness, cuteness too.

But then she falls for the film:

Mr. Kolirin wrings even more visual humor from this contrast by placing the men in the center of the image and ensuring that they don’t move for several beats, which locates them in spatial and existential isolation. It’s a facile, familiar movie trick, and Mr. Kolirin comes close to wearing it out before the band even leaves the airport, largely because massing the men in this fashion threatens to diminish their individuality. But it’s a clever stratagem too, because the comedy eases you into the story and obscures the currents of seriousness swirling under the film’s surface.
Mr. Kolirin, it emerges, is wrenching comedy out of intense melancholia.

And then, she tries to read political commentary into the movie (although, in my opinion, the filmmaker might be as aloof as his characters, at least politically-wise, and perhaps it’s political as well):

The terminal loneliness that haunts this scene may be universal, but Mr. Kolirin also seems to be saying that a specific loneliness haunts Israel as well.

And finally, a correction is in order: Mr. Sasson Gabai, the film’s lead, is not an Israeli-Arab. He is a Jew, and one of the most loved actors in Israel. The rest of his band-mates are indeed played by Israeli-Palestinians.

Michael Koresky for IndieWire

REVIEW | Grace Notes: Eran Kolirin’s “The Band’s Visit”

Koresky’s review is quite similar to my own, but at the same time the exact opposite. He too thought too many scenes are just “too cute” but he disliked what for me was the best scene of the movie: the one where a suave Egyptian trumpeter gives a clueless Israeli youth dating tips, a scene played out in pantomime to the sounds of a sappy but adorable Seventies Israeli pop song:

Of course, for every underplayed moment, there’s another that egregiously angles for audience ingratiation…
And an attenuated subplot involving handsome ladies’ man trumpeter Haled (Saleh Bakri) giving dating advice to a clueless local at a roller disco threatens to infect the entire film with a severe case of the cutes.

But he, like most, is ultimately fond of the film:

Yet overall “The Band’s Visit” remains an astute crowd-pleaser without sacrificing its core emotional honesty. It’s tempting to write it off as a precious and politically reductive metaphor for Arab-Israeli relations, yet Kolirin allows so many tender grace notes that the possibility of cross-cultural communication seems not only possible but essential.

Scott Foundas for The Village Voice and LA Weekly

Band of Brothers

In my opinion, the best written and most astute review of the bunch, as opposed to the others, Foundas has found the movie to be anti-cute:

In the hands of many another filmmaker, that same basic setup might have made for an overly earnest exercise in getting to know thy former enemy. But Eran Kolirin, the 34-year-old writer-director of The Band’s Visit, is too smart to bore us with ham-fisted humanistic bromides, and has a sense of humor as dry as Bet Hatikva’s arid desert wind.
…
Kolirin has the instincts of a popular entertainer and the disposition of an artist. He takes raw materials that could easily be rendered as kitsch—a fish-out-of-water story, the idea of music as a universal language—and he builds them into something unexpectedly lyrical and resonant.

Kenneth Turan for The Los Angeles Times

‘The Band’s Visit’: Orchestrating a poignant marvel

Kenny Turan gives Kolirin’s film its best review, and his observation of the film’s climate is amusing, to the eyes of the Israeli viewer:

“The Band’s Visit,” the Israeli film that’s become celebrated for what it lacks — enough Hebrew to contend for the best foreign language Oscar — can now be seen and appreciated for what it has in abundance: visual wit, verbal charm and a completely droll sense of humor.

Though its characters and situations make it quintessentially Israeli, “The Band’s Visit’s” sly, restrained sensibility also gives it an unexpected Scandinavian flavor. It’s as if the wonderful Norwegian “Kitchen Stories” was transplanted to the Middle East, with the endless desert substituting for frozen wilds.