A sugar coated Israeli film' The Band's Visit' and its hidden meaning

The Band's Vist has opened in New York and Los Angeles, in order to qualify for the Oscar category for best foreign film. It will run a week. 18Brumaire saw this award winning film at a Lincoln Centre picture house. Pensioners flocked to see the film in numbers, but not the young. At best, the film is sappy. It's a 3 hankies film for the film maker Eran Koliran has not only directed but written a sappy film to tear at one's heartstrings. The story is simple: a mistake brings a visiting Egyptian classical Arabic orchestra, whom no one is there to greet at the aeroport, to the wrong town in Israel. The band has been invited to inaugurate an Israeli Arab Cultural Centre. Playing on the differences of alphabet, confusion reigns. Hebrew and Arabic, but Hebrew has the letter P, but Arabic doesn't. B is the closest to the P sound. So invited to play at Petah Tikvah, which to the Arab ear sounds similar to Beta Tikvah, it lands in Beit Tikvah, an arid, barren, forlorn settlement which looks abandoned and perhaps on the dark side of an Israeli nightmare. There the band spends the night thanks to hospitality of a grass widow Dinah who finds these Egyptians in strange looking blue uniforms a break in her day to day monotony. She arranges for them to stay at a friend's home, and at her restaurant. So we have a road film in the thick of a night which reveals the spiritual loneliness and desolation of Beit Tikvah which in translation means 'House of Temple of Hope', and hope there isn't by a far lot. The journey into the night to an almost empty restaurant or the oppresive atmosphere of a flat without love or a skating ring, is like a Virgil leading Dante through the portals to his Infereno where hope reigns not.
Arabic becomes the language of momentary relief of boredom...it's the language of love in song and in a shag with Dinah; it is the handsome young Egyptian violinist Harled or Khalid who initiates a timid, hang dog looking Israeli in the art of losing his virginity with a homely date. For Dinah Arabic recalls a golden age of family when she and her mum and sister would watch Arabic films on the telly...as she recalls with deep longing for the handsome Omar Shariff and his beautiful wife Fatem Hammamet, or for the crooning playboy matinee idol Farid Al Attrache or the great voice of Oum Kathloum. Arabic and the Egyptians become a talisman of sorts. Which brought 18 Brumaire back to the days of his boyhood when Muslims who thought a girlfriend had put a spell on his sexual prowress would call at night at the local rabbi for some verse from the Torah to cast out the demons haunting him. The magic worked at times, for it was the unknown Hebrew script which had the power to undo evil and had a restorative power.
But the brief stay of the bank doesn't restore anything. It exposes the vacuity and vapidness and the moral degenerecy of the state of Israel. Israel with its Arab citizens, you do not see; nor do you see the brutal seizure of Palestinian lands by rapid, rapcious Israeli settlers for land which is not theirs; nor do you see the brutal military occupation of everyday life among the Palestians on the west bank. It is an Israel eaten by the cancer of its own colonisation of land which is theirs, carrying out a policy of bantustans for dominance of a subject Palestine. This is the real message of the film which has won so many awards. This is the glaring message which is lost to those that see the film. And such is the pity!