They are the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, a band from Egypt. Their leader, a severe man with a perpetually dour expression, crosses the street and asks the woman for directions to the Arab Cultural Center. She looks at him as if he stepped off a flying saucer. “Here there is no Arab culture,” she says. “Also no Israeli culture. Here there is no culture at all.”
They are in a dorp in the middle of the Israeli desert, having taken the wrong bus to the wrong destination. Another bus will not come until tomorrow. The Band’s Visit begins with this premise, which could supply the makings of a light comedy, and turns it into a quiet, sympathetic film about the loneliness that surrounds us all. Oh, and there is some comedy, after all.
The town they have arrived at is lacking in interest even for those who live there. It is seemingly without activity. The bandleader, named Tewfig (Sasson Gabai), asks if there is a hotel. The woman, Dina (Ronit Elkabetz), is amused. No hotel. They communicate in careful, correct English—she more fluent, he weighing every word. Tewfig explains their dilemma. They are to play a concert tomorrow at the opening of a new Arab Cultural Center in a place that has almost, but not quite, the same name as the place they are in.
Tewfig starts out to lead a march down the highway in the correct direction. There is some dissent, especially from the tall young troublemaker Haled (Saleh Bakri). He complains that they have not eaten. After some awkward negotiations (they have little Israeli currency), the Egyptians are served soup and bread in Dina’s café. It is strange how the static, barren, lifeless nature of the town seeps into the picture even though the writer-director, Eran Kolirin, uses no establishing shots or any effort at all to show us anything beyond the café—and later, Dina’s apartment and an almost empty restaurant.
Dina offers to put up Tewfig and Haled at her apartment, and tells the young layabouts (who seem permanently anchored to their chairs outside her café) that they must take the others home to their families. And then begins a long, quiet night of guarded revelations, shared isolation, and tentative tenderness. Dina is tough but not invulnerable. Life has given her little that she hoped for. Tewfig is a man with an invisible psychic weight on his shoulders. Haled, under everything, is an awkward kid. They go for a snack at the restaurant, its barren tables reaching away under bright lights, and Dina points out a man who comes in with his family. A sometime lover of hers, she tells Tewfig. Even adultery seems weary here.
When the three end up back at Dina’s apartment, where she offers them wine, the evening settles down into resignation. It is clear that Dina feels tender toward Tewfig, that she can see through his timid reserve to the good soul inside. But there is no movement. Later, when he makes a personal revelation, it is essentially an apology. The movie avoids what we might expect, a meeting of the minds, and gives us instead a sharing of quiet desperation.
As Dina and Tewfig, Ronit Elkabetz and Sasson Gabai bring great fondness and amusement to their characters. She is pushing middle age; he is being pushed by it. It is impossible for this night to lead to anything in their future lives. But it could lead to a night to remember. Gabai plays the bandleader as so repressed, or shy or wounded, that he seems closed inside himself. As we watch Elkabetz putting on a new dress for the evening and inspecting herself in the mirror, we see not vanity but hope. And throughout the evening we note her assertion, her confidence, her easily assumed air of independence. Yet when she gazes into the man’s eyes, she sighs with regret that as a girl she loved the Omar Sharif movies that played daily on Israeli TV, but play no more.
There are some amusing interludes. A band member plays the first few notes of a sonata he has not finished (after years). A band mate calls him “Schubert.” A local man keeps solitary vigil by a pay phone, waiting for a call from the girl he loves. He has an insistent way of showing his impatience when another uses the phone. In the morning, the band reassembles and leaves. The Band’s Visit has not provided any of the narrative payoffs we might have expected, but it has provided something more valuable: an interlude involving two “enemies,” Arabs and Israelis, that shows them both as only ordinary people with ordinary hopes, lives, and disappointments. It has also shown us two souls with rare beauty.
Bang the Drum Slowly
PG, 98 m., 1973
Michael Moriarty (Henry Wiggen), Robert De Niro (Bruce Pearson), Vincent Gardenia (Dutch Schnell), Phil Foster (Joe), Ann Wedgeworth (Katie), Patrick McVey (Mr. Pearson). Directed by John Hancock and produced by Maurice and Lois Rosenfield. Screenplay by Mark Harris.
Bang the Drum Slowly is the ultimate baseball movie—and, despite what a plot summary might suggest, I think it’s more about baseball than death. It takes place during the last season on this Earth of one Bruce Pearson, an earnest but dumb catcher from Georgia who learns, in the movie’s first scene, that he is suffering from an incurable disease. The movie is about that season and about his friendship with Henry Wiggen, a pitcher, who undertakes to see that Bruce at least lives his last months with some dignity, some joy, and a few good games.
On the surface, then, the movie seems a little like Brian’s Song. But it’s not: It’s mostly about baseball and the daily life of a major league club on the road. The fact of Bruce’s approaching death adds a poignancy to the season, but Bang the Drum Slowly doesn’t brood about death and it isn’t morbid. In its mixture of fatalism, roughness, tenderness, and bleak humor, indeed, it seems to know more about the ways we handle death than a movie like Love Story ever guessed. The movie begins at the Mayo Clinic, follows the team through spring training, and then carries it through a season that feels remarkably like a Chicago Cubs year: a strong start, problems during the hot weather, dissension on the team, and then a pennant drive that (in the movie, anyway) is successful. There isn’t a lot of play-by-play action, only enough to establish the games and make the character points. So when the team manager and the pitcher conspire to let Bruce finish his last game, despite his illness, the action footage is relevant and moving.
Bang the Drum Slowly was adapted for the screen by Mark Harris, from his observant 1955 novel. He seems to understand baseball players, or at least he can create convincing ones; if real baseball players aren’t like the ones in this movie, somehow they should be. The director, John Hancock, is good with his actors and very good at establishing a lot of supporting characters without making a point of it (in this area he reminds me of Robert Altman’s shorthand typecasting in M*A*S*H and McCabe and Mrs. Miller). Some of the best scenes are in the clubhouse, an arena of hope, despair, anger, practical jokes, and impassioned speeches by the manager.
He’s played by Vincent Gardenia as a crafty, tough tactician with a heart of gold he tries to conceal. (“When I die,” he says during one pregame pep talk, “in the newspapers they’ll write that the sons of bitches of this world have lost their leader.”) He knows Bruce and Henry are concealing something, but he doesn’t know what, and his efforts to find out are hilariously frustrated. At various times, the midwinter visit to the Mayo Clinic is explained as a fishing trip, a hunting trip, a wenching trip, and a secret mission to rid Bruce of the clap.
Gardenia, as the manager, is the third angle of a triangle that includes very good acting by Michael Moriarty, as Henry, and Robert De Niro, as Bruce. Henry is the All-Star with the $70,000 contract and Bruce is a mediocre catcher who is constantly being ragged by his teammates. Henry’s his only friend, until somehow when the team comes together for the pennant stretch, Bruce starts playing the best ball of his life, and the club (somewhat predictably) accepts him.