‘The Citizen’ directed by Roland Vranik
Review by Peter Belsito
In The Citizen, an immigrant picks a bad time to fall in love.
A very timely, relevant film exploring Europe’s, and the world’s, current crisis with immigration. The drama takes place at ground level, through the eyes and lives of the characters as they struggle to figure out what the system requires of them in order to stay where they are, and here it’s modern Hungary, in order to have peaceful lives.
Love happens at a bad time for Wilson Ugabe (Cake-Baly Marcelo), the protagonist of this Hungarian film. A middle-aged immigrant from Nigeria, Wilson has a lot on his plate from the opening scene, in which he’s depicted flunking Hungary’s compulsory exam that will determine his eligibility for citizenship.
“Don’t come back for another year,” one of the exam’s proctors says to Wilson. But he is not easily dissuaded. Eva (Tunde Szalontay), the manager at the supermarket where Wilson works as a security guard (and where he is later awarded Employee of the Year), recommends that he hire her sister, Mari (Agnes Mahr), as a tutor to help him with language skills and historical lore.
No sooner does he start his studies than he’s obliged (due to his good nature and conscience) to shelter a pregnant Iranian migrant with no papers, who soon gives birth in his flat. And then Wilson and Mari, who’s married with two good-for-nothing, live-in adult children, fall hard for each other.
The heart-wrenching story of The Citizen begins with a citizenship exam, where the examination committee rigorously questions Wilson Ugabe, a middle-aged African man. No matter how beautifully he recites Hungarian poetry, Wilson, a political refugee in his late fifties, fails the exams for the umpteenth time, because he doesn’t know the details of ancient Hungarian history.
As for leaving Africa Wilson argues that his reasons include his fellow citizens cutting pregnant women in half, yet he doesn’t manage to soften the heart of the committee members.
Working as a security guard, Wilson doesn’t give up, and decides to take private civics lessons from Mari, a teacher specializing in Hungarian history and culture. The two fall in love, and Mari abandons her marriage to move into the man’s apartment.
However, she’s not the only woman living there — Shirin, an Iranian girl who escaped from Hungary’s refugee camp in Bicske, has been living there illegally for months, and gave birth in the small bedroom, with the assistance of Wilson.
After the first third of The Citizen (‘Az Állampolgár’), migration and integration are no longer the central themes, but instead provide the background to the slowly unfolding love story.
The sexuality of aging women is an even greater taboo than a woman leaving her family, and it was indeed unusual to see the fulfillment of the love between the middle-aged Mari and graying Wilson.
So the film raises these questions — 1. Will Wilson succeed in the exam, 2. Will Shirin’s hopeless situation be resolved, 3. What will come of the unusual relationship between a Magyar teacher of retirement age who left her family, and a black refugee?
The film, directed by Roland Vranik from a script by Mr. Vranik and Ivan Szabo, is a careful, compassionate and beautifully acted character drama with a social conscience. The viewer may be exasperated by some of the seemingly poor decisions made by the characters. (Wilson’s stubborn masculine pride, or what seems like that, can be especially frustrating.) But by the end of the picture, what hits hardest is the credible depiction of the desperate straits the refugee characters find themselves in despite their best efforts.
In Hungarian, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes.
