Butler's Cinema Scene

“THE TRIBE” My rating: B

132 minutes | No MPAA rating

“The Tribe” is a foreign language film, but not in the way we’re accustomed to.

Set in a rundown school for the deaf in Kiev, Ukraine, this feature from writer/director Miraslov Slaboshpitsky offers not a word of spoken dialogue. The cast members — all deaf — converse in sign language. There are no subtitles.

Which means that viewers had best pay close attention to what happens on the screen. You can’t let your eye wander and expect the soundtrack to fill in the blanks.

“The Tribe” blends the boarding school movie — in which a new kid struggles to fit in — with a crime drama. Perhaps more important, it gives us entry to an insular environment in which young people band together to deal with a hostile outside world that they view with anger and contempt.

We witness all this through the eyes of the new kid (Gregory Fisenko). We don’t know his back story, where he came from or why at this relatively late stage of his education he finds himself in this particular institution. Perhaps he grew up in a rural area and now requires intensive study and immersion in deaf culture before entering adult life.

What he gets mostly is an immersion in crime.

Apparently lacking adult supervision except in the classroom, the students  run their own dormitories and have built a small criminal empire.  Attractive girls are driven out to a truck stop to earn cash from prostitution. Groups of deaf kids mug and beat pedestrians — especially if the victims have just paid a visit to a liquor store. There’s a suitcase filled with plump plastic bags — evidently drugs of some sort.

The new kid observes these goings on, endures a couple of beatings as a sort of initiation, and is gradually admitted to the criminal ranks. He seems to have no moral compass — indeed, none of the students do — and quickly adapts.

But he makes the mistake of falling for one of the coed hookers (Yana Novikova). For the cynical girl he’s just another trick, but for the new kid — delirious after his first sexual encounter — it’s much more. Now he’s willing to betray his confederates to ensure that he and his dream girl have a future together.

That’s about it for story.  What smacks you between the eyes here is Slaboshpitsky’s rigid yet evocative cinematic language.

“The Tribe” is told in long uninterrupted shots, some stationary, some relying on complex camera tracking.  In most cases the actors are seen from head to toe — there isn’t a single closeup in the entire feature.

Each shot is presented almost as a stand-alone play.  Occasionally these setups  may seem static and remote, but there’s always something happening in the frame that needs to be reckoned with. In fact, this methodology forces the viewer to approach the world the way a deaf person does, to watch with more clarity, to seek out visual meanings where normally we’d rely on the spoken word.

And in a curious way it makes us appreciate that while many deaf individuals want to interact with hearing society, there are others who have no use for the rest of us, who believe that deaf culture is superior.  Who believe that they have the right to prey on the rest of us.

All this is just your friendly reviewer speculating, of course. This film doesn’t stop to deliver a polemic (although the often violent physical gestures with which the deaf converse nicely approximate a rant). It’s just a sense of things that percolates through.

“The Tribe” also contains two of the most harrowing sequences seen in recent cinema. In one single long shot, a teen prostitutes undergoes a back-alley abortion — it’s so real you wonder if  this is acting or something even more intimate. And late in the film there is a prolonged act of violence (again, shot in a long single take) that will leave viewers gasping and ashen.

Shlaboshpitsky is no moralist. He dishes the dirt and expects us to make up our own minds on how we feel about it. I wouldn’t be surprised if some organizations for the hearing impaired  condemn the movie for its nihilist portrayal of young deaf people.

It’s a thorny, sometimes unpleasant experience. But riveting.

| Robert W. Butler