Foreign films: The Valet and The Band’s Visit

I love foreign films! In fact you could probably call me a foreign film snob. I love watching movies that have no familiar faces in them; where people don’t act, look, talk, walk, etc. like I do. Anything unfamiliar is good. One reason I love movies is to get out of my own life, to broaden my horizons, to see the world, to pretend for a couple of hours and foreign films are generally better at providing all of this than are American films.

Two good foreign films I’ve watched lately are The Valet (French) and The Band’s Visit (Egyptian/Israeli).

The Valet is from the master of French farce, Francis Veber. It is a comedy of errors where the rich guy, in trouble with his wife, gets a valet to live with his supermodel mistress to prove that he’s been faithful. Very funny!



The Band’s Visit
I had been looking forward to this one & it was well worth the wait. An Egyptian police orchestra ends up in a desolate Israeli village & has to depend on the locals for help. It is a quiet film & doesn’t have as much music as I expected (what music it had was fabulous) but the people from the 2 countries came together: they touched each other in ways beneficial to both. It was indeed “a global charmer!” (Lisa Schwarzbaum—Entertainment Weekly) I loved it!