The Promise of Babel

Equality is a lie sold to people my age from so-called developing countries. With foreign languages used as brick and mortar, we aimed to build a Tower of Babel under the promise of globalization.

That promise didn’t quite come true. Connections expanded —and proof of that is I am writing in a language alien to me⁠—but biases remained in people judging the shape of our eyes or our skin color. The edifice in itself is flawed since we, as humanity, behave as atomized individuals pursuing our own benefits. And inequality works as a ruthless structure, with the weight of oppression tearing the Tower apart in different ways.

Two good-looking men hold a sign written in Hebrew amid a joyful gay parade. “Equality,” the sign says; Ben (Shlomi Bertonov) and Raz (Ariel Wolf), the affluent homosexual couple holding the sign, would agree that’s a fair thing to demand.

In his second feature, Concerned Citizen, writer-director Idan Haguel builds an almost perfect life for the couple at the film’s center. Their home is a refurbished apartment in a booming neighborhood in south Tel Aviv; all they need to complete the idyllic picture is a baby. But things start crumbling the night Ben calls the police on an upstairs neighbor, an Eritrean immigrant guilty of leaning on a tree Ben had just planted. The brutality that ensues makes Ben feel guilty—a journey that’s not always easy to follow as spectators.

“A real Tower of Babel,” says a skeptical woman looking to buy Ben’s apartment later in the film. The jibe comes after she realizes Hebrew floats in the community together with the lilting sounds of Tigrinya and Filipino, languages spoken by the refugees living nearby.

Multiculturalism is welcomed as long as it comes as an ornamental Buddha sculpture, the curry you cook, the twerking you dance, or the surrogate womb you hire. The few wide shots in the film capture this world within a universe stashed with derelict buildings and diverse skin colors. Often, the camera closes in to frame a fancy coffee shop, a gym, or the couple’s stylish apartment. In the background, a woman of color pushes a stroller or a black man mops the floor and serves as a means for Ben to wash out his sense of guilt by defending him from a (more) racist man.

This, to me, is what incapsulates the film’s inefficacy. Hard as it tries to show the oppressor's gaze with flashes of humor, the movie struggles to square laughter with its racist subtext. The narrative pushes Ben to the limits of the pathetic, but immigrants remain one-dimensional characters whose sole purpose is to detonate the protagonist’s inner struggles.

Having a womb is a privilege depending on the context, a childish Raz argues. A person of color in a foreign land is an immigrant, but a white foreigner is an expat, some would say. Let this film be a means to question our own role within structures of oppression, and recognize ourselves (and Ben and Raz) as both victims and victimizers in our contemporary Babel.