(Ukraine, 132 min.)
Written and directed by Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy
Starring: Grigory Fesenko, Yana Novikova
Photo removed due to Google and Ad Sense's ridiculous censorship.
Evidently they object to seeing the deaf embrace!
There’s a “Two Thumbs Up” joke to make about The Tribe, but this film set in the
world of the deaf doesn’t quite merit it. Director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy
makes a significant debut with The Tribe,
which features no audible dialogue and invites the audience to watch drama play
out in sign language without the aid of subtitles, translation, intertitles, or
narration. The film shows audiences a world and an experience that generally
aren’t included on film, so there’s no denying that The Tribe is a bold, landmark experiment. This sensation from last
year’s festival circuit, however, is ultimately a bold, landmark experiment
that disappoints. Give it the universal sign of one thumb wiggling horizontally
between ‘yay’ and ‘nay’.
This night-time business at the local truckstop gives The Tribe its first gut-wrenching twist—and
perhaps its first effective use of the characters’ inability to hear noise—when
a big rig backs up over the girls’ schoolmate pimp as he finishes a cigarette
while the girls finish their tricks. The audience hears the truck rev its
engine and viewers take for granted the beep
beep beep of the truck as it reverses. Before one even knows the horror,
the truck consumes the boy under its wheels. The sound of the crunch is
deafening.
Sergey then begins a downward spiral as he assumes the
pimply duties of the school and engages in a power struggle to become the new
alpha male on campus. Slaboshpytskiy explodes the mundanity of the episodic
glimpse into the lives of the students with bursts of graphic violence and
explicit sex as Sergey wrangles with peers and strikes up a relationship with
one of the girls whom he prostitutes. The
Tribe holds nothing back and Slaboshpytskiy shows more intent on putting
audiences through hell than engaging them with these students: unrelenting,
uncomfortable (and frankly gratuitous) violence punctuates a disjointed
narrative, while the harrowing experience of watching a girl undergo an abortion
is not for the faint of heart.
Don’t try to understand the workings of the school or the
characters at play—one never learns their names outside of the press notes—even
though the expressive work of the actors communicating in sign language offers
some access points. One only gets the gist of what’s going on in the film. It's
like watching a film in German or French without subtitles, except that the
perceived foreignness of the language is the aim. The Tribe doesn’t seem to know what to do with the gap between the
sign language and film language though, as it never fully immerses the viewer
in the world of Sergey and his schoolmates. The inability of the subjects to
hear one another takes a horrifying twist in scenes of rape and murder in which
student in the dorm cannot hear their peers become victims, so the lack of
vocalization sometimes takes the film to new heights, but it’s not enough to
compensate for 132 minutes of protracted observation. The Tribe--no pun intended--doesn't say much.
Slaboshpytskiy shoots the film almost entirely in long take
tableaux shots that capture the action from a considerable distance. There’s
nary a close-up in The Tribe and the
film keeps the viewer detached and distant: one observes The Tribe like one observes a snippet of ethnography or a manmade
habitat through a wall of glass at the zoo. Slaboshpytskiy never bridges the
subjects’ language with the film language and The Tribe leaves one hoping that the visual power of the film could
create a common language between audience and subject. The long takes are
impressive, although they struggle to benefit the experimental style and the
episodic narrative that already make considerable strains on the viewer. The Tribe curiously plays like a Romanian
New Wave wannabe that redeems itself with technical accomplishments and the
significance of its onscreen representation. This film wouldn’t cause a stir
with a cast of English-speaking actors.
Its soundtrack is significant as the use of background noise
and sound effects are strikingly effective, particularly when they substitute for
dialogue and function as narrative, thematic, and emotional turns or as provocative
exclamation marks. Fists smack faces, testicles slap bums, co-eds pant heavily,
and blunt instruments flatten students’ heads in jarring acts of violence. The
characters’ inability to hear sound, however, only functions to convey victimization.
Therein sits another troubling element of The
Tribe that really gets under one’s skin as the film develops: The Tribe isn’t tailored for a deaf
audience. With ambient noise peppering the film, though, one always feels like
an outsider looking in, trapped and unable to help, paralyzed by the ruse of an experiment.
Rating: ★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
The Tribe screens in Ottawa at The Mayfair and in Toronto and TIFF Lightbox.
