It's the sentiment beneath the satire that makes 'The Band's Visit' a pleasure

When the eight members of the Alexandria Ceremonial Orchestra get off the bus in Israel, there is nobody to pick them up to take them to the Arab Cultural Center, where they are scheduled to perform. As they try to figure out the way for themselves, they wind up stranded in a small desert town where they are offered shelter for the night by the Jewish townsfolk.

That is both the situation and the extent of Eran Kolirin's debut feature, "The Band's Visit," a slight but wise comedy about the loneliness that makes all men brothers.

Besides the obvious tensions between the Arabs and the Jews, who speak their own languages among themselves but use English when speaking with each other, Kolirin's screenplay sets up a conflict between Tawfik, the stuffed-shirt leader and singer of the orchestra, and the youthfully insolent Haled, a violinist who also plays trumpet when he wants to impress ladies with his Chet Baker appeal.

Tawfik and Haled take shelter with Dina, a liberated divorcee whose romantic imagination has been fueled by weekly excursions to Egyptian movies starring Omar Sharif. Both men are attracted to her, she is attracted to both men, and each, in his own way, wins her.

The rest of the orchestra members are given lodgings in a home where friendships develop despite the fact that they are initially resisted.

Kolirin directs in a minimalist style indebted to the early films of Jim Jarmusch. In the group scenes, he enjoys heightening the alienation of the displaced musicians by placing them in odd compositions against unlikely surroundings. The sight of the band members walking along a highway through the Israeli desert in clean, starched, bright blue uniforms is one of the film's most memorable images.

Beneath its satirical surface, "The Band's Visit" has a sentimental heart, with Kolirin at his best in the two-character scenes through which he explores the common humanity that makes brothers of those divided by cultural, political and racial barriers. In the final scenes, he shows that the same music resonates in each individual, no matter how different from one another they seem on the outside.

It is a small message, but a sincere one, about the solitude that separates us, and how the expression of this solitude can bring the unlikeliest of people together.