On paper, “The Tribe” sounds almost like someone’s idea for a
parody of arthouse cinema: a story set at a corrupt Ukrainian boarding school
for deaf teenagers, acted out with no translation, no subtitles, no music, and
no voiceover. It sounds unbelievably artsy and affected, and while it makes for
an undeniably challenging watch, the film is far from dull.
Director Miroslav Slaboshpitsky
dumps us headlong into this often bewildering environment and without any sort
of compass to navigate this world, we’re forced to really work in order to
process what’s happening. The experience requires the sort of intense alertness
that one isn’t used to maintaining over the course of an entire movie.
We see everything through the eyes of a new student, Sergey (Grigoriy Fesenko), as he arrives
and immediately gets sucked into the school’s brutal way of life. The school is
a front for all manner of criminal activity carried out by a gang of boys who
appear to operate at the behest of a couple of Fagin-esque
teachers. The boys rule over the school, intimidating younger students into
thievery, and earning their own income by pimping out two of their indifferent
female classmates at a local truck stop. Sergey is indoctrinated into the gang,
working his way up in the pecking order with unnerving speed, but hitting a
snag when he falls in love with one of the exploited girls (Yana Novikova).
Filmed with nonprofessional young performers who are
themselves deaf, each scene of the film takes the form of a single unbroken
take, captured through stunningly graceful camerawork by Valentyn Vasyanovych (also the film’s editor). It’s formally
daring and astonishingly ambitious, even more so considering this is Slaboshpitsky’s first feature.
Throwing the audience into this world without any way to
orient ourselves is an effective way for Slaboshpitsky
to recreate the isolation and disorientation a deaf person may feel in the
hearing world. It’s a powerful empathetic tool, though here it does little to
counteract the horrifying behavior on display, so it’s a little mystifying why
the director decided this particularly bleak and brutal story was the one he
wanted to tell with it. Perhaps it comes from a simple desire to counteract the
saint-like depiction of the differently abled we tend to find in the majority
of popular culture. But whatever the reason, Slaboshpitsky
is at times too clearly out to shock us, and the increasing brutalization of
the film’s characters becomes difficult to watch — the violence somehow
rendered all the more disturbing by the relative silence that blankets it. Grim
and disturbing, “The Tribe” is bound to polarize audiences. But through all its
savagery, the audacity of the filmmaker’s vision is absolutely riveting.
This article appears in Nov 4-10, 2015.
