The Band's Visit

Maybe this is how your concerto ends. I mean, not a big end with trumpets and violins. Maybe this is the finish, just like that, suddenly. Not sad, not happy. Just a small room, with a lamp, a bed, a child sleeps, and tons of loneliness.

We begin this film with a bus driver, his vehicle stopped at a very empty bus station, moving a giant yellow sphere from the trunk to the cabin. Not unlike, we note, a sun orbiting a medieval earth that once thought itself the center of a much smaller universe. The driver departs, revealing in his wake an eight-man uniformed squad standing at attention. A helpful caption, the kind you might find in equal measure in one of those terribly modern, terribly ironic stories, and in an older provincial tale completely devoid of irony, enlightens us: "Once, not long ago, a small Egyptian band arrived in Israel. Not many remember this; it was not that important." A pithy summation of many an average life, which, it seems, our characters are resigned to lead.

Our band is the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, and its leader is the sad-eyed curmudgeon Tawfiq Zakariah (Sassoon Gabai). It is he who steps forward at that bus station when he espies a small girl with flowers – surely someone must have been dispatched to welcome the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra – only to see her reunite with some family members. It is also he who rejects the suggestion by his deputy Simon (Khalifa Natour) that the band contact the Egyptian Embassy. "This band has managed for twenty-five years" without, it is implied, the slightest diplomatic privileges; he then alludes to the "current circumstances" as particularly unpropitious to such action. He decides to place a phone call, perhaps to the Arab Culture Center whose opening is the occasion for our film's title. His phone call, in labored but quite clear English, is greeted with a violent "what?" (or maybe, "what!"). He tries again, adding Colonel to his name (which keeps ending in Orchestra), and gets hung up on even more quickly. The bandmates loiter around the station; the eldest member sits hatless with a cigarette and is mistaken for a panhandler (he will later be revealed as a singer of rousing force that belies his age). So after refusing outside aid and taking matters into his own ineffective hands, there remains only one option left to the leader: delegation. For the task of asking which bus leaves to Petah Tiqva, the Colonel selects Khaled (Saleh Bakri), whom, I believe, reviews of The Band's Visit refer to unanimously as "the handsome trumpet player." As it were, the trumpet playing, of which we get a taste much later on, is just a side project: Khaled is the band's violinist, a role he spent "five years at the academy" to be able to fill. Despite these fantastic qualifications, Khaled indeed sees himself first and foremost as a "handsome trumpet player," which explains his pick-up routine at the ticket window, as well as why perhaps the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra does not take the right bus.

Even a relatively callow viewer can imagine the rest of our alleged plot; but even the most experienced cineaste cannot predict how correctly it all develops. The band will arrive in a town whose name to Arabic (but not to Hebrew) speakers is a homophone of Petah Tiqva; there will be a girl, a tender-hearted fellow facing familial expectations, and another fellow under a very different type of societal pressure. The band is informed of its predicament and elects to stay in this humble oasis until the following day, when the right bus will depart to the right town; how the musicians spend the night will therefore encompass the meat of the film. Somewhere along this tortuous path to Petah Tiqva – which we don't really doubt our octet will reach – the band will be mocked by passers-by, in this case, friends of one of the pressured young men who first greet the visitors (our oasis seems at times to be a single housing compound). But if the plot has little to offer, we don't mind overmuch. On the wrong bus, Simon mentions to the Colonel that this musical excursion could be the band's last if "that measure is approved." But it won't be approved, the Colonel tells him with the assurance of a lifelong bureaucrat who has seen countless projects fail. Then a black-and-white picture of a woman in his wallet makes the Colonel fall silent and look out the window. Simon, who has been with the Colonel for twenty years, will also express regret about not having completed a concerto a long time ago, a concerto interrupted by his wife's pregnancy with a much more tangible masterpiece. The person to whom he confesses all this is Itzik (Rubi Moskovitz), a new father who has been "between works" for almost a year. His wife resents what she correctly identifies as a lack of ambition; his parents never seem to have loved each other and disagree about everything; and Itzik looks upon his sleeping child, a creation far greater than that of any artist who has walked this earth, and accepts his destiny as a father – nothing more, nothing less. It is Itzik who reluctantly takes in Simon and two of his bandmates for the night, because he has gone through most of life reluctantly. It is also Itzik who, in an odd moment of self-awareness, utters the quote that begins this review, talking at once about Simon and, of course, himself.     

Cinematic rules dictate, however, that our dual protagonists, the Colonel and the handsome trumpet player, will have to stay at the house of the film's primary female character, Dina (Ronit Elkabetz). Dina is somewhere between the Colonel and Khaled in age: she is a bit too old for Khaled and a bit too young, and too spry, to hold the very stiff arm of a man who insists at every moment on taking himself seriously. Dina has had her husbands and her chances – a picture of a much younger and prettier Dina adorns her wall – but somehow, it didn't work out (now and then she sleeps with a married man because, well, both their existences lack adventure). She takes the Colonel out to paint the oasis red and the two discover things about each other that only strangers divulge – strangers who know that this is the first and last time they shall ever meet. That they use a third language, English, for this communication is consonant with their own privacy and limitations; after all, you can only tell a stranger so much before it turns into an assault. The Band's Visit is one of those rare films in which you see everything coming, you are proven right, and yet you never really imagined how sweetly the prediction could come true. There is much comedy, especially involving Khaled, who in the film's iconic scene abets (in a modern twist to this old story) a very inexperienced local. But our compass and chart is Tawfiq Zakariah, a man so serious he must be either insane or the victim of some unspeakable loss. So when Dina ribs the Colonel as to why the orchestra plays traditional Arabic music like Umm Kulthum, he rebuts, "that is like asking why a man needs a soul," a question answered in the film's magnificent closing song. It is also like asking why a man returns all the fish he catches to the eternal sea.

A Little Cloud

The author of this story is split in two: Ignatius Gallaher, the cosmopolitan rake who has no interest in anything and his hand in everything; and our title character, the meek and pious Thomas "Little" Chandler who loves the night and melancholy poetry. Normally, such a dichotomy would beget deep sighs of disdain from the literary-minded who want their figures clear but not clear-cut. Yet in this case the debate is far more fundamental: it is the debate between those who choose to live for their families and those who only live for themselves. Joyce, a man who by most accounts never really decided between these two life paths, only succeeded in one facet of his existence, that of art. His methods were hardly novel, albeit well-chosen. At the age of twenty-two, Joyce selected his bride from among the fairest maidens of Dublin − she not being one of them − because it was she whom he was destined to love and it was she who would accompany him to Trieste, to Switzerland, to Paris so that he would never be completely alone. It is common for literary biographers to overextend the influence of their subject's work into the personal and intimate banalities that lead to practically every coupling on earth as well as every inhabitant. Perhaps we are fools for supposing that a great artist can separate his identity from his reality, his dreams from the contagious mist of mediocrity that swirls about him on every corner, his physical and emotional handicaps from the weaknesses of all men at all times. Yet this is precisely what Joyce attempted, and he tried harder at it than any other major writer of the twentieth century. He failed and failed badly and almost became a footnote within Irish literature. Now we can imagine it: Here lies James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, b. 1882.  Addio terra, addio cielo. 

Around the age of thirty-two, however, when, like Little Chandler's, "his temperament might be said to be just at the point of maturity," and after ten years of Bohemian uprisings that nearly resulted in his family's perdition, Joyce opted to wed the everyday and the elevated, and in so doing showed us the full contour of his soul. Rarely had such an educated man such a filthy sense of humor; among the truly great (this doesn't mean you, Mr. Sterne) only Mozart's and Goethe's seemed to be on the same base plane. It is this hedonistic, selfish, scatological Joyce that cradles the Petri dish that is Ignatius, both a famous saint and a name rooted in fire and the diabolical pursuits of the Greatest of Pleasure Seekers. Ignatius does not possess a single redeeming quality, and Joyce would have it no other way. Conceding some elements of humanity to this despicable lout would deprive him completely of his relevance as a symbol and the more-than-rare occurrence of someone slowly becoming the poster child for the vice he or she embodies (in Ignatius's case, the vices are a collective). 

Is Ignatius simply a wastrel in a primitive allegory about values? Most certainly; yet he is also representative of the need of modern humanity − even though the need has surfaced time and again for centuries − to justify its instincts by praising the beauty of youth, of frivolity, of unaccountability, of meaninglessness. I think the majority of young men of privilege, myself included, have fought through the phase which Ignatius endorses as truth itself. Take for example Chandler's worries about the City of Lights:

− Tell me, is it true that Paris is so ... immoral as they say?

Ignatius made a Catholic gesture with his right arm.

− Every place is immoral, he said. Of course you do find spicy bits in Paris. Go to one of the students' balls, for instance. That's lively, if you like, when the cocottes begin to let themselves loose. You know what they are, I suppose?

− I've heard of them, said Little Chandler.

The only sincere statement in this whole exchange is Chandler's first question, a fear of missing out on the best that life has to offer, if that's really what one defines as the best. For every girl that becomes part of our past, there are a dozen that can only populate our speculative dreams. And for Chandler, married two years ago at the uncoincidental age of thirty, life consists of refraining from the poetry that his soul desperately wishes to express in favor of a bourgeois home of wife, child, and unambitious job. There is little wrong to such a scenario apart from the great injustice it inflicts upon the artistically minded. Those select few may have other jobs in which they support themselves while spending evenings and weekends on their true passion; and they may manage a personal life that needn't be a series of mistakes, regrets, or distractions. Chandler would be the person to strike such a balance if he weren't, in his own words, "timid." That is why, after his futile evening in Gallaher's shadow,  "he [still] wished to vindicate himself in some way, to assert his manhood," the silliest and most juvenile of male instincts, even at the somber age of thirty-two.

The end of A Little Cloud has been much discussed, but it is not as significant as the rest of the story. As is unfortunate in tales of simple characters that gain in importance owing to the smoothness of their correspondence to people we know, we are prone to manufacture our judgments from our last impressions, from fateful cracks in the armor of otherwise solid citizens who have perhaps just lost their way. Once Chandler determines that "Gallaher was only patronizing him by his friendliness just as he was patronizing Ireland by his visit," the mood shifts from hopeful expectation to resentment to a brief acknowledgement of the greatest ill of our modern society − selfishness. Never before has man been so capable of forging his own destiny − without anyone else, without country, without God − and transforming himself into who or what he desires regardless of "birth and education," two factors in which Chandler is actually Gallaher's superior. But with this freedom comes a concomitant responsibility that is far harder to embrace. As hard in fact as Chandler's infant child − a boy and little cloud who, like his father, continues to pass unnoticed through the twilight sky.

Fet, "Фонтан"

A work ("Fountain") by this Russian poet.  You can read the original here.

 

Night and I, we breathe as two,
Drunken air of lime-like hue,
Wordless then we hear a sound:
Lapping songs our ears surround,
Fountain streams are swaying through.

Blood and thought and body, we
Wait as docile slaves to see:
All shall rise in boldness high
To the limits we espy,
Under fate’s hard-won alee.

Thought is borne and my heart beats,
Squints dispel no darkened sheets,
Once again my heart finds blood,
Reservoirs with my beams flood,
And sweet dawn the night defeats.

Blood Simple

As this film opens, an unseen narrator addresses us and a highway that could only exist in America about how things are done in a very faraway place, Russia. In Russia, we are told, everyone "pulls for one another," doubtless one of the kindest euphemisms for communism and one its founders would surely endorse (at the time, Russia was merely the largest socialist republic within an enormous union that stretched – well, I think you know the rest). Such magnanimity is not to be found, however, in a certain, mighty state in America's south. "I don't care if you're the Pope of Rome, the President of the United States, or Man of the Year" – and the incongruity of this triptych will be explained shortly – "in Texas, you're on your own." A reliable friend or two can help mitigate the horrible isolation that such a mantra will inevitably beget; but there are no friends, reliable or otherwise, willing to assist Julian Marty (Dan Hedaya).

Julian owns a bar named after his favorite person, himself. We may pardon this vanity when we consider how often bars and restaurants adopt their proprietors' names, if only to inject a modicum of familiarity and personableness into everyday commerce, but Julian's behavior is otherwise inexcusable. His wife Abby (Frances McDormand, in her screen debut), not his first spouse given their twenty-year age difference and a comment by another character, does not love Mr. Marty for a number of reasons that will become painfully clear. But the most immediate is that Julian's interests only involve money and all the little perks that running a successful nightlife establishment might bestow upon its namesake. It also does not aid Julian's cause that one of his bartenders, Ray (John Getz), is a strong, silent type, and a perfect foil to his older, neurotic, and far less comely employer. In a very early scene, therefore, we hear two voices where we cannot see faces, only a dark, rainy windshield through which everything is established: an extramarital affair, the backdoor man being the cuckold's employee; the gift Abby receives on her first wedding anniversary; the suggestion that the husband might be deranged; Ray's refrain of "I ain't a marriage counselor," and Ray's assurance that he does indeed "like" Abby (fighting words from such a strong, silent type). The adulterers pull into a convenient motel on the way to Houston and re-shatter Abby's wedding vows, only to be awakened the next morning by a phone call from the very man whose trust they are betraying, and their worst-kept secret becomes a public dilemma.  

The publisher is a man called Loren Visser (a masterful M. Emmet Walsh), who not only directs Julian to the correct roadside hotel, he also supplies pictures of the bedmates in their half-naked glory. From his unusual accent and lighter inscribed "Man of the Year" (one wonders whether this was a competitive election), it is clear that Loren, a private detective with no qualms about what his profession may entail, is the narrator of our opening scene. Julian takes the ocular proof of his long-held suspicions as he seems to take every twist that life produces, that is, with scarcely concealed rage (the gumshoe assures him the news isn't all bad: "You thought he was colored.  You're always assuming the worst"). But when the Man of the Year seeks payment for what he deems a fine night's work, Julian is hesitant to take any further steps until, in accordance with his temperament (an unsubtle reference to this figure suggests that Mr. Marty may have been born Mr. Markaris), he has properly chewed on the problem. It is a credit to the filmmakers that we sympathize with a lowlife like Julian Marty; it is an even greater accomplishment that we come to think like him. Throwaway phrases ("marriage counselor," "I haven't done anything funny," "Having a good time?") acquire a hideous double meaning, the very kernels of paranoia and derangement, and the effect extends past our cuckold. When Julian implies his spouse has made a habit of such indiscretions, the charge punctures Ray's pride and, for just a second, distorts his features. How curious that male adulterers are so egotistical in their almost uniform conviction that they are the first sidesteps a married woman has taken (an adulteress usually assumes she is one of many). Photographs in the childless Marty homestead recur to the lightweight pistol that Julian gave his wife a year to the day after they were married and Abby's words in that opening scene ("I should leave or use it on him"), and we know that no reconciliation is possible. Unlike other stories in which adultery is an aberration, a mistake, a bump in the road, here things cannot end well. So when Julian finally finds Loren, he gets into his passenger seat with the assurance of someone who has gotten into that passenger seat a hundred times. And he offers its owner ten thousand Texan dollars to rid the world of yet another adulterous couple.  

What happens next is perfectly logical and perfectly insane, or, I should say, it is logic pursued down a path that no reasonable man would ever tread. I cannot admire the Coens' movies in general because they build either on pure atmosphere (impossible in a serious film unless you stick to noir) or over-the-top irony (both very modern and very useless). With Blood Simple, however, a studied masterpiece, they remain firmly in the first category. Rarely has guilt seemed so visceral; rarer still are the reactions of the perpetrators as human and convincing as in this triangle of love and hate. This has much to do with the acting: McDormand is convincing as not a dumb girl, just one with very straightforward interests; Hedaya plays the perfect villain without being evil, only consistently repulsive; Getz looks permanently disgusted with himself, with his adultery, and possibly with other acts; and Walsh is simply marvelous, stealing every scene with his nuances of expression. When he first presents the motel photos, he is so anxious for approval of his work you can almost see his lips moving with the words he wants to hear; when offered the blood bounty, we see fear and greed and fear of greed alternate in one sweaty stare ("I'm supposed to do a murder," he looks out the window.  "No, two murders," and we witness the whole awesome range of emotions). The repeated use of the dialectical definition of simple to mean 'stupid,' or 'mentally deficient,' draws us back to our title (although the title is ostensibly culled from a line in this novel). How is Loren supposed to trust Julian, obviously a man of boundless self-interest, not to squeal (or as he phrases it, "not to go simple on" him)? In Russia, if we recall Loren's prefatory dialogue, "they make only fifty cents a day," and the detective stares out the window as if realizing that in that cold and distant land he would never be faced with such moral or financial dilemmas. Or perhaps any dilemmas at all.  

The Duel of Dr. Hirsch

Dr Hirsch, though born in France and covered with the most triumphant favours of French education, was temperamentally of another type – mild, dreamy, humane; and, despite his sceptical system, not devoid of transcendentalism. He was, in short, more like a German than a Frenchman; and much as they admired him, something in the subconsciousness of these Gauls was irritated at his pleading for peace in so peaceful a manner. To their party throughout Europe, however, Paul Hirsch was a saint of science. His large and daring cosmic theories advertised his austere life and innocent, if somewhat frigid, morality; he held something of the position of Darwin doubled with the position of Tolstoy. But he was neither an anarchist nor an antipatriot; his views on disarmament were moderate and evolutionary – the Republican Government put considerable confidence in him as to various chemical improvements. He had lately even discovered a noiseless explosive, the secret of which the Government was carefully guarding.

It is not without merit to wonder about the humanities and their value to a modern education; what is without merit is to wonder about doing away with them. Humanities, so poor a choice of words that it is trumped in this poverty only by nebulous gangs calling themselves "humanists," has very little to do with being human. Most properly it has to do with things that are not human – gods, arts, theories, impressions, and speculations. We earthfast apes are constructed of none of these; in fact, science, in its endless altruism, an altruism that resembles the endless black holes it worships, continues to inform us that we are hewn of flesh, bone, liquid, and some other, more delicate substances. At some point, perhaps through the end of the seventeenth or eighteenth century, there lived a type of man who could aggregate all fields of knowledge into some constellation of our thinking; who could blend and break all necessary components into what we may not inaccurately term a world-view. Alas, science has done away with the generalist and replaced him with a horde of specialists who know better than anyone about the breathing patterns of field mice and the varying palpability of seaweed. And while we may rightly mourn the loss of such paragons of excellence, we can instead celebrate the small – indeed the microscopic or atomic. Which brings us to this famous tale.   

Dr. Hirsch has already been described in the paragraph beginning this review, so only a little more about him should be mentioned. As a "scientist, publicist, and a moralist," he may be safely pigeonholed as a pedantic glory hound with an advanced degree in applied mathematics; but let us not get ahead of ourselves and, more importantly, of Dr. Hirsch. Like other would-be demagogues, Dr. Hirsch's most telltale qualities are best reflected in his acolytes, in this case, a certain Monsieur Brun and another, no less certain, Monsieur Armagnac:

They were both short, brisk and bold. They both had black beards that did not seem to belong to their faces, after the strange French fashion which makes real hair look like artificial. M. Brun had a dark wedge of beard apparently affixed under his lower lip. M. Armagnac, by way of a change, had two beards; one sticking out from each corner of his emphatic chin. They were both young. They were both atheists, with a depressing fixity of outlook but great mobility of exposition. 

Since this tale was composed precisely one century ago, right before Europe raged against itself in the most hideous internecine that continent had faced in the Christian era (only to be outdone by even greater strife, but we are, again, laps ahead of the competition), it is here that we call upon the modern reader to extrapolate this pithy portrait to the current day. Transpose their beards to the tops of their heads with equal vim: the age is still young; the belief is still nothingness upon nothingness; the outlook is still rigid, morbid, and vapid; and the exposition is most definitely mobile, because their lives will be as short, brisk, and bold as their gaits (and for that "horrible green absinthe, which they could drink apparently in any weather and at any time," you may substitute another green intoxicant, not drunk). That Monsieur Armagnac adheres to a militarized form of pacifism – in other words, shooting his superiors and whoever else gets in his way – and Monsieur Brun has suggested that, "the common expression 'Adieu' should be obliterated from all the French classics, and a slight fine imposed for its use in private life," should not surprise the careful reader because extreme zealotry tends to resort to violence and censorship. And there is no fouler example of a militant religious zealot than one who demands that everyone believe in nothing or, more specifically, that everyone believe in the particular nothing he happens to fancy.  

I fear we have forgotten all about Dr. Hirsch, but that's just as well. In the works of this author, it is easy to overlook the parade of pundits and focus on the simple expressions of a country priest who is neither simple, nor very partial to rustic mores. What happens to Dr. Hirsch – from our title, apparently a combatant – will have to wait as we examine some of the pearly asides: "The Duke, however stimulated, had the instincts of an aristocrat, and desired rather to stare at the house than to spy on it"; "I cannot speak like Clemenceau and Déroulède, for their words are like echoes of their pistols"; "The lane down which they followed him was one of those that seem to be at the back of things, and look like the wrong side of the stage scenery"; "He was a forked radish of a fellow, with just enough bulb of a head to make his body insignificant." Yet the most devastating of all observations has to do with our acolytes, whom Father Brown sizes up efficiently: 

They have no instincts. I mean those things that make a woman refuse to dance with a man or a man to touch an investment. They've been taught that it's all a matter of degree.

Instinct is one word, but we can think of several others. And as much as nuance can be important in explaining anything of value, such as gods, arts, theories, impressions, and speculations, we would be well-served to trust in something greater still, something that can and cannot be explained. Something that has absolutely nothing in common with a noiseless explosive.