I can’t stop thinking about this film. Gimmicky, maybe, but brutally confident and powerful, and encased in its own miasma of strangeness. The Tribe is by the 41-year-old Ukrainian writer-director Miroslav Slaboshpitsky. It was first aired at last year’s Cannes, and then at the London film festival, where its avant-garde reputation went before it, and audiences assembled in the spirit of those attending the performance of an undiscovered text by Samuel Beckett, or a new classical stage production by Tim Supple. It went to Canada and the US, and there was a public controversy in Ukraine when it wasn’t chosen as that country’s Oscar entry for best foreign film. Now The Tribe has a general release here, and UK film-goers up for a challenge can savour it: a silent movie, of a kind, at once brutally explicit and mysteriously opaque: a study of abuse, an essay in loneliness, a political allegory.
The Tribe (loosely developed from the director’s 2011 short film Deafness) is set in a dilapidated state boarding school for hearing-impaired teenagers in Kiev, where neglected students are abandoned to a Lord-of-the-Flies-type anarchy, and where the violent bullies are the rulers. A newcomer (Grigoriy Fesenko) nervously arrives and is instantly plunged into a secret, feral world of gangs and crime.
There is no dialogue, no subtitles, no intertitles, no explanations – and no orchestral score or incidental music. Everything is conducted in untranslated sign language and this even accompanies the fistfights. There is a continuous accompaniment of shoes squeaking and shuffling on lino floors, in squalid institutional dorm corridors, where the doors open outwards, like hutches for animal experimentation. The whole thing happens in eerie quiet, as if beamed live from another planet without an audio link.
Well, if signing is a language like any other, then why not have subtitles? Is our experience of this movie any different from watching any foreign-language movie without subtitles? The point, I think, is that the characters’ silence underscores their alienation from us. They are a different tribe: outside the law, below the salt. And their silence has something to do with the criminal code of omertà: you don’t talk. Like any group that is isolated and treated as inferior, the students have been left to incubate their own microbes of violence and pain. Moreover, the silence gives the characters the air of people who are under surveillance, like figures on CCTV footage. It reminded me also of the experimental film Bullet in the Head (2008), by Jaime Rosales, where the characters are seen as if through a powerful pair of binoculars.
There are inchoate non-verbal whispers, inarticulate whimperings, suppressed whinnies of fear, and grunts of anger and pain. I couldn’t help remembering the quotation attributed to Nietzsche about dancers being thought insane by those who can’t hear the music. The deliberate, confrontational style of the film and its black tragicomedy reminded me of that notorious joke about Helen Keller falling down a well, and breaking three fingers calling for help. It looks and sounds like a bizarre musicless ballet of anxiety and dismay.
You just have to get the gist of this film and follow its larger building blocks of narrative; I confess there were times I couldn’t be sure exactly what was happening, moment by moment, but the choreography of intimidation and humiliation is plain enough. The tough guys are evidently running rackets that have evolved from the (legitimate) business of peddling trinkets to raise money for the school. This has branched out into sex abuse, with girls pressured into working as prostitutes. The new boy falls in love with one, at the same time her gangmasters are preparing to send her to Italy for bigger money.
Is the film in some way about Ukraine’s own tribal identity, as distinct from Russia’s? One scene – a rare classroom scene, in which the principals are submitting to the school’s notional authority – shows a map in which Ukraine is seen in a western European context. There is a political stratum to The Tribe, just under its overt emotional level, an allegorical comment about the national experience of not hearing and not being heard. It is part of the makeup of one of this year’s strangest and most disturbing films.
