Peace songs

An Egyptian police band plays a gig in Israel in the film The Band's Visit. (Sony Pictures Classics/Mongrel Media)

There’s never a quiet time to release a film set in the Middle East. The endless march of current events has a way of turning even the timeliest Middle Eastern art into dusty anachronism. The rage that followed the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, for instance — an anger that has fueled so much Arab art over the past year — has given way to a fresh raft of crises. As the memory of one battle dims, another rises to take its place.

There is, however, one constant, or at least there has been since the 1973 Middle East War: the state of chilly détente between Israel and its southern neighbour, Egypt, the only Arab nation other than Jordan to formalize a peace treaty with the Jewish state. When it was signed, under U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s aegis at Camp David in 1978, the accord pointed towards a Middle East that could accommodate Israel and iron out some of the dizzying territorial issues that have repeatedly flared up into all-out war. Alas, the Camp David accord is of another era; the gulf of enmity between Arab countries and Israel has grown impossibly vast.

Thus, when we see the Alexandria Police Ceremonial Orchestra stranded at Ben Gurion Airport in the opening shot of The Band’s Visit — Israeli director Eran Kolirin’s new film — the musicians look understandably nervous. Armed only with the appurtenances of an eight-piece band and a playlist of western classical and Arabic traditional music, they are in Israel to play the inaugural event at an Arab Cultural Centre in a remote town. With their immaculate powder-blue uniforms and cumbersome luggage, blending in is impossible.

Deserted by their chaperones and confounded by the local language, they have no idea where they are going. Tewfiq (an excellent Sasson Gabbai), the orchestra’s buttoned-up conductor, assigns Khaled (Saleh Bakri), the youngest member of the band and a decided lady’s man, the task of finding a bus to Petah Tikvah. Khaled instead lands them in the desert outpost of Beit Tikvah where, according to Dina, the owner of the town’s only restaurant, there’s “not Israeli culture, not Arab, not culture at all.”

Dina (Ronit Elkabetz) and Tewfiq (Sasson Gabai) find a way to communicate despite their cultural differences. (Sony Pictures Classics/Mongrel Media)

There are also no buses until the following day; the band has little choice but to bunk down for the night. And so this gentle but pointed comedy unfolds: Tewfiq and Khaled go home with Dina, who finds herself drawn to the conductor, an older, staid soul. Over the course of the evening, the characters speak in the Middle Eastern Esperanto — broken English — but also through what Kolirin suggests is the best communicator of all: music. And we are suddenly privy to the inner lives of people who share so many cultural memories, but so few real world expectations.

Kolirin isn’t interested in drawing any explicit regional metaphors; rather, his film is about the small, seemingly insignificant things countries lose when they erect concrete or cultural walls. Beit Tikvah, like Israel, has largely sacrificed its Arabic legacy in exchange for a tenuous desert existence. As Dina points out in conversation with Tewfiq, 20 years ago, Egyptian movies played on Israeli television every Friday afternoon. (Cairo was, until recently, the Arab world’s Hollywood. Call it Carrywood.) Dina recalls, with that special brand of nostalgia we have for pop culture, the big actors like Omar Sharif, Pathen Hamama, I’del Imam and “the big words: habibi!” Those words once infused an Israeli culture that shared a love of the Big Gesture, the sweeping melodrama, the histrionics of Arab cinema and music. Instead, as Kolirin has pointed out, “we got MTV and BBC and ‘Israeli Idol’ and pop songs and 30-second commercials. So who cares about quartertone songs that last half an hour any more?”

Tewfiq surely does. When asked why the Alexandria police need to play the works of the great Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, Tewfiq says, “You might ask why a man needs a soul.” Umm Kulthum is the Arab soul. Since she started recording in the 1930s, Umm Kulthum has become the voice of four generations of Arabs, all of who revere her. (The only western corollary might be the peerless mezzo-soprano Maria Malibran, who sang in the pre-recording age, and is therefore not as boisterously celebrated.) Umm Kulthum was no less an icon in pre-1948 Palestine, among Arabs and Jews alike. Many of the Egyptian singers who preceded her came from Cairo’s Jewish community; she sang before a revitalized Hebrew became a national language. In later years, Israel was culturally redefined by immigrants from Eastern Europe, to whom this music was utterly foreign, and by an eventual hardening towards all things Arabic.

Kolirin, born in the tumultuous year of 1973, remembers when things changed, when Israel could no longer find space for Arabic — “the strange, curling script that is the mother tongue of half our population.” There were once Arab street signs on Israeli roads, Arab music on Israeli radio stations; the country was once subject to the furious cultural exchange that is inherent to any healthy pop culture. But successive wars, successive intifadas and the curdling of Israeli/Palestinian relations have choked this off. In central Israeli towns, there are campaigns afoot to definitively subsume local Arab culture. In a country that has become increasingly militarized and literally walled in, an outward view becomes almost impossible.

So to someone like Dina, Arab culture has become exotic, and a complete anomaly in a town like Beit Tikvah, which has all but abandoned culture. But according to Kolirin’s film, music remains a persistent language. Khaled uses Chet Baker’s My Funny Valentine as his mode of seduction. At an awkward dinner with several other members of the band, a grizzled sabra — the term for first-generation native-born Israelis, most of whom fought Egypt in ’67 and ’73 — sings Summertime to his Egyptian guests. Khaled recites the love poetry of the classical Arab poet Rumi, as does Tewfiq. They fill the desert silence of Beit Tikvah, nourishing it like water.

The Band’s Visit is something of an absurdist fantasy; it’s unlikely that an Egyptian police orchestra would be allowed such freedom of movement within Israel, and unlikelier still that they’d want to be there. Just last week, there was a suicide blast in southern Israel, which the Israelis blame on the breach in the Rafah Gate separating the Gaza Strip from the Egyptian Sinai. (Incidentally, Kolirin’s film was not allowed to visit either the Cairo or Abu Dhabi film festivals, despite the latter’s assurances to this writer that they are at the vanguard in loosening cultural restrictions in the Arab world.)

The Band’s Visit evokes another Middle East, one of shared music and shared memory, where the quartertones of Umm Kulthum are of the greatest importance, and desert echoes with the sound of Rumi — or the plaintive horn of Chet Baker.

Richard Poplak is a Toronto-based writer. He is currently working on a book called The Sheikh’s Batmobile: In Pursuit of American Pop Culture in the Muslim World.

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