In silence, brutal wisdom displayed
The Tribe centres on a corrupt school for the hearing impaired
THE TRIBE Rating:
Starring: Grigoriy Fesenko, Yana Novikova, Rosa Babiy Director: Miroslav Slaboshpitsky
Running time: 132 minutes
The Tribe builds to a revolution in your attention, forcing you to change not just how you watch the film but how you feel its characters. But director Miroslav Slaboshpitsky is sly enough to ease you in.
The first shot is of a boy at a bus stop, far left in the frame, pacing nervously; eventually a bus comes, and a calmer boy has emerged on the far right edge, looking for directions. He’s the one we’re going to be following from now on, and it’s a subtle hint that Slaboshpitsky isn’t interested in letting your vision persist, at least not passively: You will look carefully at every image here, and it will come to feel like both benediction and brutality on the part of the director.
This forced change of perspective is due to Slaboshpitsky’s decision to set The Tribe in a school for the deaf, having it play out entirely in untranslated sign language. It’s a cinematic idea so elegant, it feels essential and obvious, even though it’s never been pulled off before.
It has the effect not just of vividly putting you into the head of its characters, who are similarly attuned to every snippet of light and shadow, but of forcing you to appreciate the subtler visual clues all movies employ.
The Tribe starts more like a typical new-kid-in-school film, following the teenage boy as he finds his first class, mopes through the lunch room, and is eventually taken under the wing of a confident insider.
Things quickly break darker, as he’s drawn into a criminal gang operating with the help of a few corrupt teachers: They begin by beating up passersby for the booze they’re carrying, but that’s just the tip of an enterprise that makes most of its money by pimping out teenage girls at truck stops.
The beginning is a careful study of group dynamics, as each slowly falls in line to the others; the end is just brutally gorgeous, as a gaggle of teenage boys butt heads in front of a murmuration of flying fingers and hands, as everyone else discusses the fight.
Because it’s pushed us towards such careful attention, the moments of physical beauty are downright ecstatic — particularly a pair of sex scenes between the boy and one of the prostituted girls, whom he falls for after a night of guarding them at the truck stop.
Crime worlds are not primarily pleasant ones, though, and whatever beauty Slaboshpitsky allows is relentlessly smashed with stark violence. There are some bracing, graphic scenes here — heads get crushed, and, more horrifying, one of the young girls is given a home abortion.
These moments make The Tribe something of a gutting for the audience, but they’re an undeniably stark way to drive the movie’s main idea home: That both on the screen and in life, there are things that we simply should not look away from.