‘Concerned Citizen’ Review: A Gentle Satire on White Guilt and White Privilege

The fine line between being right and being righteous is at the center of Idan Haguels Concerned Citizen. The Tel Aviv-set film follows a young gay man living in a neighborhood thats supposedly on the upswing who has to question whether his commitment to bettering this increasingly gentrified community is all that selfless or whether, in fact, that moniker he uses to describe himself and which gives the film its title is a smokescreen for more unseemly sentiments about his immigrant neighbors. Haguels deft dark comedy is a tight character study of the curdling effects of white guilt and white privilege.

Ben and Raz (real life couple Shlomi Bertonov and Ariel Wolf) live in a picturesque apartment. Their shelves are adorned with masterfully manicured house plants and hip coffee table books on Bowie; their every morning is scored by the sounds of their robot vacuum followed by the hum of their blender as they make each other green juices to kick start their day. Together theyve created a safe haven within their doors that staves off the relatively chaotic urban world right outside their door. Theirs is what weve come to label a neighborhood in transition namely, a community where low real estate prices have begun to attract couples like Ben and Raz who value the multicultural vibe of their environment in theory though perhaps not so much in practice.

When Ben plants a tree on the street right outside of his apartment, he feels as if hes helping better the space for all those around. That is, until he sees from his balcony, two young Black neighbors casually hanging out by the still-fragile tree. He worries if they keep leaning on it, this added greenery will outright snap, only his pleasant if needlessly abrasive demands go mostly unheeded. After confronting his Eritrean neighbors outside, he retreats to his cozy apartment and calls the city (anonymously, of course), only to witness soon thereafter how two policemen harass and brutalize one of the men with impunity.

The episode rightly rattles Ben, who keeps trying to go about his days as if nothing had happened as if he hadnt made anything happen. He and Raz continue to pursue a surrogate pregnancy while Ben tinkers away with architectural designs at his office. Except Ben cant keep the image of a police officer kicking in the head of his neighbor out of his mind. Not that Haguel actually gives us such didactic framing. Instead, his camera lingers on Bertonov during these mundane moments and you see him distractedly trying to keep up, lost in thought, clearly at a loss as to how to proceed (unsurprisingly, the film is at its brightest and Ben at his most ebullient in public during a brief sequence set at Tel Avivs sunny pride parade).

Theres a tidy conceit here with which Haguel sets to out Bens own privilege. The holier-than-thou attitude he and Raz display when discussing their real estate (and family planning) choices start to look insidious and compromising once its clear Ben may not be cut out to live in a building where human feces randomly show up at the communal vestibule. Maybe one of his neighbors is right about selling and moving away (the homeless, the junkies, the refugees, he says about the neighborhood, it breaks my heart).

With an at times thumping at others intentionally distressing score by Zoe Polanski, Haguels fable about human foibles crashes into a climax that establishes the young Israeli filmmaker as an attentive observer of the lengths men like Ben will go to rewrite their own story. The films caustic ending serves as a coup de grace for what is an increasingly claustrophobic story about blinkered visions and self-made narratives. Much of that is owed to Bertonov, who wryly captures Bens misguided attempts at rectifying, resolving and eventually retconning the entire affair. Haguels naturalism (he shot the film in his own apartment and cast a real life couple) lends itself quite well to the acerbic comedic rhythms of his screenplay, which end up just shy of creating a caricature of its central characters as good gay gentrifiers.

Camera and film alike stay squarely with Ben. This makes Concerned Citizen oppressively self-contained. Theres no room here for any insights into how those nameless Eritrean neighbors he sporadically interacts with on the stairwell feel about this crazy neighbor of theirs (as they dub him), nor even for any inkling of what goes on in Razs mind as he witnesses his husband starting to behave a tad irrationally. Thats intentional, though it does add a level of shortsightedness to its structure that nags the same way it does Ben. With its piercing, probing final moments, which turn self-flagellating into thorny cathartic territory, Haguel has crafted an intimate portrait of privilege thats as damning as it is discomfiting.