Low-key charm and pregnant pauses filled with gentle, actorly nuance go a long way to carry “The Band’s Visit,” the first feature by the Israeli writer-director Eran Kolirin. The deadpan, fish-out-of-water comedy, about a small Egyptian police band that finds itself stranded overnight in the desolate nowhere of an Israeli village, was selected to be Israel’s Academy Awards entry for Best Foreign Language Film. That’s always a boon for a small, subtitled effort, and Mr. Kolirin got an extra, if unwanted, dose of publicity when his film was subsequently disqualified for having too much of its dialogue spoken in English.

The decision was unfair, since it’s immediately evident that while the dramatic framework is not unique to any time or place, the pervasive cultural fission is site-specific.

Whether or not this light, yet thoughtfully intuitive, ensemble piece, which opens in the city today, was really Oscar material to begin with is another question, but the film’s sweetly melancholy tone and knack for fashioning wordless insights into the human condition make it easily appealing — loosely in the manner of, say, a Semitic Bill Forsyth.

The comedy’s heart beats inside the proud chest of Tewfiq (Sasson Gabal), the by-the-books conductor of the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, an Arabian classical music ensemble dispatched to a remote pocket of Israel to perform for the opening of an Arab Cultural Center. Unfortunately, something’s amiss and no one arrives to gather them at the airport. After the rakish violinist Khaled (Saleh Bakri) becomes distracted flirting with a pretty ticket clerk, the musicians end up on a bus to their supposed destination, which turns out to be a town with a similar name.

Idly shuffling about in powder-blue uniforms that would do Michael Jackson proud, the octet has to wait until morning for the next bus out. In the meantime, they must depend on the kindness of Israeli strangers who aren’t obliged to be sympathetic. But since they have fallen on the mercies of a spirited, unconventional young café owner, Dina (Ronit Elkabetz), the musicians are about to have a little adventure.

When Dina hosts both the courtly, uptight Tewfiq and the handsome ladies’ man Khaled at her apartment, it sets up a kind of psychological ménage-à-trois that takes the rest of the film to play out. Ms. Elkabetz is marvelous to watch, with her tumbling black curls and swaggering hips, and she dutifully avoids cliché, marshaling her character’s provocative sexual energies to pinpoint effect. Dina is fascinated by Tewfiq, whose masculine steeliness conceals a deep sadness that begs to be chipped away, just as he grows increasingly intrigued with her liberated airs and the slightly husky timbre in her voice.

The cross-cultural attraction shared by the pair begins to slowly unlock emotional barriers. Khaled, meanwhile, kills an evening at the roller disco with one of Dina’s slacker patrons, Papi (Shlomi Avraham), and gives him a hands-on demonstration of how to caress his blind date, which Papi awkwardly does.

Eventually, the trio reconvenes at Dina’s apartment, where the story plays so elliptically that it becomes a passing thought — a sexual encounter, yes, and a significant resolution of the Oedipal conflict between Tewfiq and his rebellious violinist, who likes to woo the girls with his rendition of Chet Baker vocalese on “My Funny Valentine.”

Rather than getting sidetracked, of course, the characters have wandered into their own profound moments through the grace of dislocation and random acts of kindness. It’s not a terribly original premise, but the actors make the situation feel authentic.