‘Showing instead of telling’ takes on a whole new meaning in the subtitle-free The Tribe, set in a boarding school for deaf students in Ukraine, which rewards the viewer who is paying attention to detail.
Ukraine
4*
Director:
Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy
Screenwriter:
Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy
Director of Photography:
Valentyn Vasyanovych
Running time: 125 minutes
Original title: Плем’я
Transliterated title: Plemya
Silence can speak volumes, as long as we keep our eyes peeled and our ears pricked. This is the central conceit of Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s unusual feature film, The Tribe (Plemya), which features no spoken dialogue but has a lot of signing going on between its characters, who are mostly high school students at a Ukrainian boarding school for the deaf. The only explanatory title card appears before the first shot to inform us that there won’t be any subtitles or voice-over.
This unorthodox approach of limiting the viewer’s ability to understand the dialogue has been used in the past to confuse us, as Michael Haneke did rather pointlessly in the opening scene of his Code Unknown (Code inconnu : Récit incomplet de divers voyages). Fortunately, in Slaboshpytskiy’s film, the action and the body language play a big part and help us in our quest to make sense of the story behind the gestures. Above all, the film reminds us that life is always happening whether we see or hear it or not. It doesn’t matter whether the tree that falls in the forest makes a sound or not; it fell nonetheless.
Although we don’t learn his name until the closing credits, the main character is the teenage Sergey (Grigoriy Fesenko), whose arrival at the school during the opening moments sets the bar so high that the second and third act, despite some stunning set pieces, never quite seem to live up to it. Dressed in everyday casual clothes, he enters his classroom to find all the boys sporting the same kind of white shirt and business jackets. Nothing has to be said; his peers’ condescension (or revulsion) is immediately apparent. Even – or particularly – in silence, the facial expressions tell a lot. And yet, Sergey seems unfazed. Does he not realise how he is perceived? Or does he not care? And why?
These questions are answered gradually as Sergey reveals himself to be a quaint mix of violence and sensitivity. His ability to protect himself quickly gains him the respect of the most delinquent and industrious guys, as he gets roped into petty crime and is soon promoted to pimping two fellow girls in his class to drivers at the local truck stop at night. At the film’s weakest points, it veers off into territory where Sergey views himself as a saviour to protect a girl he has spent an intimate moment with, and all of this feels like something we’ve seen before in countless other spoken-word stories.
The Tribe finds greatest success in those scenes where we realise the degree to which the characters’ hearing impairment affects their lives in ways hearing viewers may be ignorant of. These are scenes (sometimes dramatic, sometimes tense, sometimes gruesome) that are unique to stories about these kinds of characters. Whether it is their soundless assaults on strangers, their inability to hear approaching danger or to call for help, or the realisation that their pain sounds so much worse when they can’t hear themselves scream, these moments are stripped down to the basics and pack an eerie, visceral punch.
Sergey’s journey from zero to hero to zero (and possibly – depending on one’s reading of the potent but ontologically dubious final scene – back to hero) is compelling but ultimately undermined by the terribly contrived romanticism that fuels some significant developments in the story’s second half. The film also struggles with coherence, as scenes in the second and third acts feel much more fragmented than those that introduced us to Sergey and presented his integration at school.
In addition, the quality of the acting is also all over the place. While Sergey is seemingly contemplative and not overly emotional (at least, for the most part), Shnyr (Olexandr Sidelnikov), who is his first point of contact with school life and also partakes in the students’ late-night criminal ventures, has persistently wild hand gestures that would seem over-the-top even when viewed with a long shot. The same is true of one of the girls being procured by the truck drivers for a bout of silent intercourse, and these histrionics are incredibly distracting.
For the most part, however, the film commands our full attention as we rely on extra-auditory cues to make sense of the diegesis. There is usually enough happening for us to follow along, even if at times we can only make out the bare outlines and have to take our best shot at figuring out the details. But it was a peculiar decision for the filmmaker to eschew any form of backstory for Sergey and to avoid introducing us by name to any of the characters. And it is equally strange that the soundtrack is already audible (in the form of a car horn being honked) on a black screen before the film proper has even started.
If The Tribe had been as thoughtful in developing its narrative past the first act as it had been up to that point, this might have been a truly breathtaking production. In his role as Sergey, however, Fesenko has a magnetic presence even when the screenplay lets him down and we struggle to empathise with him, and he is a big part of the film’s general impressiveness.
