The Tribe

While recent­ly Michel Haz­anavi­cius’ The Artist and Miguel Gomes’ Tabu have pas­tiched the mimet­ic motifs of Silent Era cin­e­ma, and oth­er film­mak­ers (notably Aki Kau­ris­mä­ki and Kim Ki-duk) have used their char­ac­ters’ voice­less­ness as alien­ation symp­tom and effect, The Tribe finds an entire­ly nat­u­ral­is­tic set­ting for its speech-free mode of film­mak­ing: a board­ing school for deaf-mute children.

Here all com­mu­ni­ca­tion is through sign­ing, and as Ukrain­ian writer/​director Miroslav Sla­bosh­pit­sky pro­vides no sub­ti­tles for these expres­sive ges­tic­u­la­tions, there exists only a tiny niche view­er­ship priv­i­leged to com­pre­hend the dia­logue ful­ly. The rest are left to eaves­drop on this sto­ry from the out­side, much as Valen­tyn Vasyanovych’s cam­era keeps its dis­tance, whether through win­dows or across noisy streets, from the film’s few spo­ken lines, so that they remain tan­ta­lis­ing­ly out of earshot.

Not that the sto­ry is so hard to fol­low. Teen Sergey (Grig­oriy Fes­en­sko) joins the school and quick­ly ris­es in the hier­ar­chy of the seniors’ gang which, with the con­nivance of a wood­work teacher, engages in acts of rack­e­teer­ing, pros­ti­tu­tion and rob­bery. Yet as Sergey falls deeply for fel­low pupil Anna (Yana Noviko­va), his destruc­tive dri­ves risk bring­ing the whole sys­tem down.

Unflinch­ing about its char­ac­ters’ sex­u­al­i­ty and crim­i­nal­i­ty, Slaboshpitsky’s fea­ture debut is a film of actions and con­se­quences, where a slow­ly revers­ing truck will lead to the need for a new pimp, and where graph­ic inter­course will lead to equal­ly graph­ic abor­tion. It is most­ly, though, a film of process and iter­a­tion, whether the repeat­ed sequences of the school­girls being pimped at a truck stop, or the rhyth­mic thrust­ing of the sex act itself. And all these rep­e­ti­tions find their per­fect sym­me­try in the bleak, blud­geon­ing final sequence where an act of vicious revenge is redou­bled – twice.

The Tribe boasts a cast of deaf non-pro­fes­sion­als who ham­mer hard at the cin­e­mat­ic con­ven­tion of por­tray­ing the dis­abled as noble and naïve. In the absence of words, the film nev­er shrinks from its obser­va­tions, catch­ing in long takes and aloof track­ing shots the rit­u­alised activ­i­ties of this pre-adult gang. This is a film whose sur­face rigour con­ceals a litany of shocks.

This is also a stark com­ing-of-age film, in which Sergey must nego­ti­ate both the trib­al struc­tures of his peer group and the bur­geon­ing demands of his own indi­vid­u­al­i­ty. Yet it is also an alle­go­ry. The first class that Sergey attends in his new school is a geog­ra­phy les­son on the EU. Anna goes through the motions of migrat­ing to Italy. Yet these deaf children’s mar­gin­al­i­sa­tion, exclu­sion and con­se­quent delin­quen­cy serve as clear – if not quite loud – signs for Ukraine’s rela­tion­ship with Europe.

Ukraine may not look or be all that dif­fer­ent from its neigh­bours to the west, but so long as its iden­ti­ty is in tran­si­tion between two states (the EU, Rus­sia) and its voice is not always heard, it remains an unruly, ado­les­cent nation, torn apart by violence.