Sweet notes on musicians' visit

In a bonehead move, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences disqualified this funny valentine,

The Band's Visit,

from foreign-film contention.

Eran Kolirin's gentle comedy about an Egyptian police band stranded in Israel is largely in English - the common tongue of Arabic-speaking Egyptians and Hebrew-speaking Israelis. Its language led the academy to brand

The Band's Visit

as insufficiently foreign.

Which is silly, because every frame of this low-key delight is about foreignness. The eight musicians from Egypt are aliens in Israel. And Bet Hatikvah, the desert village where they arrive thinking it Petah Tikvah, is peopled with Sabras who are displaced in their own country.

Now that I've got that off my chest, I ask you to close your eyes. Imagine a cloudless blue sky on a sunny, humidity-free summer day. Now, imagine eight musicians wearing martial regalia of exactly that shade of sky-blue, beached in the desert with their instruments and roller bags.

Here they are at the airport, a police squad armed not with guns but violins. The host from the Arab Cultural Center is not there to greet them. So the band's tightly wound conductor, Tewfiq (Sasson Gabai), orders the bedroom-eyed Haled (Saleh Bakri) to get directions to their destination.

First-time filmmaker Kolirin paces his can-we-all-just-get-along? parable as if it were a silent comedy, which for long stretches it is. This movie about musicians has no soundtrack. Its musical moments are few, but potent. Kolirin is unusually attentive to the music of Arabic, as when one character launches into an unsubtitled soliloquy on love and lovemaking.

The director lingers a few beats longer than necessary on these awkward strangers in a strange land, lingers so long that both the Israeli characters in the film and the audience of whatever nationality can identify with these fish out of water.

Because they've missed the last bus out, the band must stay overnight in Bet Hatikvah, a village without hotels. In one of the film's many sight gags, the visitors are in a cafe lined with photos of Israeli war heroes when one of the Egyptians casually hangs his hat over one picture.

Tewfiq encounters his seeming opposite in Dina (Ronit Elkabetz), a cafe owner as loose and spirited as the band leader is buttoned-up and melancholy. Dina recognizes before Tewfiq does that both of them are loners seeking human connection.

As the cafe owner warms up the cool conductor, Haled offers courtship advice to Papi, a painfully backward Israeli man, in a sequence worthy of Charlie Chaplin.

From these first steps, citizens of adversarial nations negotiate how they might be partners at the bigger global dance.

Written and directed by Eran Kolirin. With Sasson Gabai, Ronit Elkabetz and Saleh Bakri. Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics. In Arabic and Hebrew with subtitles and some English.

Running time:

1 hour, 29 mins.

Parent's guide:

PG-13 (brief profanity)

Playing at:

Ritz Five and Showcase at the Ritz Center