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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for March 18, 2008

OGIC: Band of brothers

March 18, 2008 by ldemanski

I was completely won over by Eran Kolirin’s The Band’s Visit. Unassuming but quietly wise, this little movie from Israel and France appears to have come and gone from New York already, but it opened in Chicago last weekend and one can hope it is playing in other cities now as well. If you get a chance to see it, don’t miss out.

Band%27s%20Visit.bmpEight Egyptian policemen, who comprise the Alexandria Police Ceremonial Orchestra, travel to Israel to perform at the opening of an Israeli-Arab cultural center. The opening scenes find them negotiating with difficulty but with dignity the challenges of a foreign airport, identically dressed in stately powder-blue uniforms. In the movie’s signature image, they stand in a row in an empty landscape, waiting. Each carries a standard black suitcase and his instrument, from a large, curvy double bass case to a small, boxy clarinet case with many sizes and shapes in between. The dry comedy of this image–a little reminiscent, to me, of a William Booth cartoon–characterizes a good deal of the movie, in which the band gets lost on the way to their concert in a sort of fortuitous, or at least adventurous, detour.

The movie has its somber side, too, leavened but not dissolved by the gentle humor it finds in simply observing, with a certain patience, human behavior. There’s much to be said about the delicacy with which it probes relationships, especially the particular intimacy that can take hold between two people who were strangers yesterday. But that’s better experienced by you than broken down by me, and there’s something else that I want to point to here: the film’s capacious view of what it is to be an artist.

The men in the Alexandria Police Ceremonial Orchestra–which their leader, Tawfiq, refers to by its full name almost without exception–are a staid and well-ordered bunch. They are, after all, policemen. You might not see them, at first blush, as true artists. They’re a far cry from being free spirits. But as the unfolding plot reveals–and the joyous last scene, in which they play gloriously for a crowd of delighted faces, confirms–they’re most serious and passionate musicians underneath the regalia. Even that’s not quite right, though: the very point is that they’re serious and passionate musicians in their regalia. Their vocation and avocation aren’t separate. Early in the movie, the incongruity of “Alexandria Police Ceremonial Orchestra” plays for gentle laughs. By the end, “Police” and “orchestra” coexist frictionlessly–they make perfect sense together.

Also surprising is the movie’s treatment of what you might expect to be its central subject: friction between the Israeli characters and their Egyptian visitors. But political friction is not what this movie is interested in. To be sure, Kolirin acknowledges this tension in subtle, fleeting ways. But, though you’re highly attuned to its possibility as the movie begins, by the end it’s displaced by the spectrum of other, more interesting ways hosts and visitors have found to relate and react to one another.

MOVIE

March 18, 2008 by ldemanski

Eran Kolirin, The Band’s Visit. This modest, wise, and funny movie plops down a band of Egyptian policeman-musicians in an Israeli nowhere land. Kolirin sidelines explicit political themes in favor of drawing out characters who are, to be sure, shaped by their cultures but not defined by them. Filled with subtle surprises, from the musical passion simmering quietly beneath its characters’ uniforms to the deeper truths that fuel that passion (OGIC).

TT: Almanac

March 18, 2008 by Terry Teachout

“I have had such a sickening of men in masses, and of causes, that I would not cross this room to reform parliament or prevent the union or to bring about the millennium. I speak only for myself, mind–it is my own truth alone–but man as part of a movement or a crowd is indifferent to me. He is inhuman. And I have nothing to do with nations, or nationalism. The only feelings I have–for what they are–are for men as individuals; my loyalties, such as they may be, are to private persons alone.”
Patrick O’Brian, Master and Commander

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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