"Not Israeli culture, not Arab... no culture at all."

While in Los Angeles this past weekend, I managed to get into a movie theater to see The Band's Visit, a small Israeli movie that earned an Honorable Mention last year at the Cannes Film Festival.

The beautiful, if somewhat unsatisfying, film is a simple clash-of-cultures tale following an Egyptian Police Band who conveniently get stuck in a desolate Israeli town in the middle of nowhere. As the Egyptians and Israelis interact in Hebrew, English and Arabic, they typically learn as much about each other as they do about themselves through the course of one long, dusty desert evening.

It is genuinely a sublime piece of acting watching these unlikely characters meet and intermingle with such ease. Director Eran Kolirin takes a decrepit town and frames it beautifully around his cast. You do get pleasantly lost in the subtlety of the whole thing.

What lost me though, and what I am sure made the festival community swoon, was the film's basic flaw:

While hope clearly blooms in the Israeli desert, in the end, the film has little plot and no resolution. It is little more than a charming character study, in an environment contrived by a silly mispronunciation.