The Tribe is a brilliant formal achievement that marks Ukrainian writer-director Miroslav Slaboshpitsky as a filmmaker to watch. It takes place at a boarding school for deaf children, with all the roles played by deaf performers; the dialogue is entirely in Ukrainian sign language, and there are no subtitles or narration to translate the conversations for hearing viewers. (Even those schooled in American Sign Language will be baffled.) Slaboshpitsky uses ingenious strategies to draw the audience into the characters’ world while respecting fundamental differences between the deaf and the hearing. The film, his feature debut, is never less than tantalizing, bringing us close enough to the subjects to inspire fascination but not close enough to establish thorough understanding. For hearing viewers, Slaboshpitsky approximates the experience of being deaf, and in that regard the film is a valuable provocation.
Slaboshpitsky’s long takes are particularly masterful. Every scene in The Tribe unfolds in a single shot, typically containing multiple complicated actions. This allows Slaboshpitsky to show how his characters react to each other in real time, emphasizing their group dynamic. Even when there are relatively few characters onscreen, the device feels purposeful. By not cutting within scenes, Slaboshpitsky makes one feel trapped in time along with the characters, which heightens the building sense of claustrophobia. (The director may well have been inspired by such recent Romanian breakthroughs as The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.) The depictions of brutality—which range from a mugging to a multiple homicide—can be difficult to watch, because you know Slaboshpitsky won’t cut away from anything until the scene is over.
Slaboshpitsky rubs our noses in the brutality of all this, presenting the sex scene, the rape, and the murders in unflinching long takes that leave virtually nothing to the imagination. (Each of these scenes lasts over five minutes, as does another that shows Anya undergoing an illegal abortion in a filthy apartment.) These sequences are commanding, yet they tell us little about the characters’ power dynamic that we don’t get from much subtler scenes in the schoolyard. The big lesson, I suppose, is that deaf people can be just as brutal as anyone else. That may sound obvious, but when you consider how few movies have any deaf characters at all, any insight The Tribe provides is novel indeed. v
Directed by Miroslav Slaboshpitsky
