Note: This article will delve deeply into the plot of MFF2014 selection, The Tribe, and as such should only be read after seeing the picture if you wish to not be spoiled. As a capsule review, I will simply state that the film is extraordinary in terms of its craft and simultaneously one of the most punishing/uncomfortable viewing experiences you can imagine, but as you’ll either find out or read below, that’s pretty much the point.
As a film critic, it is both disheartening and understandable to sometimes see viewers and even fellow critics mistake depiction for endorsement in the cinema. After all, there are any number of movies released in the multiplexes yearly that revel in transgression without meaningfully engaging with a social context for such actions. I love horror movies for their ability to tackle social issues meaningfully through the use of thinly-veiled metaphor or allegory, but it would be foolish to not notice a world of difference between the thinking behind a movie like Teeth versus a movie like Jason X. All of which is a means of saying you have to go through the knotty process of identifying a filmmaker’s intent when a film troubles you, which laid heavily on my mind as I left the theater after experiencing Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s The Tribe, as stunning of a film as you’re likely to see at this year’s MFF or at any other point. The hook of the film is an audacious one to be sure – it’s essentially silent, told entirely in unsubtitled Ukrainian sign language with an entirely deaf and mute cast, meaning you have to focus intently on body language and contextual cues to understand the narrative thrust of each scene. This heightened focus is coupled with an approach that means to lull you into, if not a sense of security, a sense of banality – where other films would have their protagonist find hidden money in a matter of moments, we spend upwards of five minutes watching as the camera dispassionately captures a thorough search of one character’s apartment – just a minor example of the film’s decidedly lugubrious pace.
The Tribe’s very title suggests something anthropological in nature, and the camerawork supports this. The entire film is captured in widescreen master shots with perspective changes only established through minimal camera movement (we either track behind or alongside these characters, always kept at a distance), giving the entire production the feel of a dispassionate nature documentary, with an almost ritualistic repetition of similar acts (we follow the students walking down the hallways, having sex or visiting a truck stop multiple times over the course of the film). When this austere visual design combines with the minimalist audio of the film – while the characters are all mute/deaf, we’re still able to hear the noise generated when a conversation is particularly emotional and crowd scenes feature a din of noise that suggests an outside world we are not granted access to – the result is nothing short of hypnotic. You find yourself leaning forward in your seat in the film’s early scenes, trying to orient yourself in this new and foreign landscape only to retreat back into your seats later on, as the film dares you to avert your glance with scenes of sex, abortion, rape and violence.
If I haven’t really gone into the inner-workings of the plot to this point, it’s because the story is a fairly standard one save for the manner in which it’s being told. Our protagonist enters this school for the deaf/mute and shortly thereafter aligns himself with a particular contingent of young males who spend their time outside of class engaging in myriad illegal activities, aligned with select school staff that aids them in their efforts – they assault and rob innocent victims and sell their fellow female classmates to truckers at night in an effort to make more money – only for our lead to find himself smitten with one of the girls and determined to remove her from this cycle of sex and violence, resorting to increasingly desperate means to do so. So, like I said, by no means a groundbreaking narrative.
It’s in the depiction of these female characters that the thorny business of determining intent becomes important. What does it mean that the role for females in this closed society is simply to be auctioned off as property to the highest bidder at truck stops? And even more complicated, how are we meant to feel when later in the film we bear witness to the female lead covertly having an abortion performed by an uncaring woman the dead of night or later yet, when the male lead rapes her despite her protestations? The very first sex scene between these two leads is a short story in and of itself – the boy propositioning the girl, her offering herself in the brusque manner she is accustomed to from her truck stop dalliances, the boy attempting to forge a more personal connection during the act and being frequently brushed off in his attempts to maintain eye contact or kiss her only for her to succumb in the face of his insistence, transforming a business transaction into a genuine experience. You can see her guard start to lower the more he treats her as a human being instead of a saleable object, presenting her with a stolen gift after their sexual encounter. But the rape sequence shows that she is just as much of an object to him as she was to anyone else in the film, as the ill-gotten money he presents her with is a sure signal that he should be granted access to her body as recompense.
So what does it mean in this particular context? These scenes are impossibly painful to watch, but we’re passively placed in front of these tableaus and given what is literally an unblinking view of these horrible acts in exactly the same way as we’ve previously watched scenes of these characters filling out documents or changing their outfits, with a similar determination to see each sequence through to its completion. Where many films would elide unsavory elements or merely suggest them, we here are presented these events dispassionately and in their entirety, the film essentially daring you to turn away from its gaze (anecdotally, a good many of those in attendance did just that) as it engages in this depiction. Rape and abortion are so frequently used as a purely narrative device that they’re removed from the emotionally-devastating and reality-rupturing context they take place in. In the bleak Ukrainian society depicted here, the girl has no recourse but to seek this covert abortion (shades of the Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) and there is no support system whatsoever, as the procedure is performed clinically without emotion, ending with her left alone in a room sobbing to herself. Much as her cries during the rape scene, they will go unheard in a society defined by its silence, a haunting reminder that even those women who are physically capable of speech are meant to be silenced by these acts and a society that largely ignores them.
To some this film and its approach will prove nothing more than an attention-seeking conceit that bores and shocks in equal measure, but if one is willing to look at the horrific scenes and think about the context they’re being presented in, the film reveals itself to be a highly emotional and outraged look at a group of people left to fend for themselves. This story, as alien as it may be in the telling, is universal – we’re able to understand the emotions and actions taking place on screen because they are our own. And such as in the film’s final moments in which the boy exacts unspeakably violent revenge on his classmates in a fulmination of a long-festering impotent male rage (after he again has tried to exert ownership over the girl who is clearly more property than person), The Tribe holds a mirror to the horrible ways in which we react to our voices going unheard.
The Tribe plays again Thursday, Oct. 2 at 7:30 p.m. at the Oriental Theatre and Sunday, Oct. 5 at 9:45 p.m. at the Times Cinema. Click here to purchase tickets.
