Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy, Ukraine 2014, 132 min.
“A boy in his teens arrives at a boarding school. Solidly built and friendless, he is soon taken up by a gang of other boys and, after a series of initiations, accepted into their ranks. The pupils are largely unsupervised, and at night they slip with impunity from the premises, bent on theft and drinking. The staff are either out of sight or in blatant collusion with the gang; the woodworking teacher acts as pimp to two of the female students, who serve the needs of truck drivers in a parking lot. Trouble arises when our hero grows attached to one of the girls and wants her for himself. What must he do to keep her?
Such are the bare bones of “The Tribe,” a new Ukrainian film, directed by Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy. What fleshes out the movie, and lends it such an extraordinary pulse of life, is the want of words. All the main characters, and the actors who portray them, are deaf. The school is solely for the deaf, and the school bell is replaced by flashing lights. Only in the closing credits do we learn that the new boy is named Sergey (Grygoriy Fesenko), and that the girl he has fought for is Anya (Yana Novikova). We have no voice-over to guide us, no music, and no subtitles to explain the sign language. Yet so vigorous are those signs, and so unmistakably sore is the inflammation of feeling behind them, that, far from being shut out, we are pulled all too fiercely into the drama’s heart. Why Sergey has to strip, for instance, before the gaze of other boys remains unclear, but the humbling is as fresh as a wound.
Only once, near the beginning, do we see an actual classroom. (There is a map of Europe on the wall, and the starred flag of the European Union: a hint of the tensions that ignited the current strife in Ukraine.) Apart from that, the normal structures of society, whether inside the institution or beyond, seem irrelevant and cracked, and, as with Jean Vigo’s “Zéro de Conduite” (1933), still the most insolent of all boarding-school films, the scurrility of the pupils bears a whiff of revolution on a wider scale. Vigo, however, took a jester’s joy in disobedience, and found time for a pillow fight that snowed unhurtful feathers, whereas Slaboshpytskiy, not content with all the natural rawness raging in the students, loads his plot with extra violence. We get a mugging, a head knocked in by a hammer, and one poor fellow who, being deaf, is unwarned by the beeps of a truck that reverses toward him. The finale is frankly medieval, and, as for the illegal abortion, performed over a filthy bathtub, on someone who cannot call out in her distress, there may have been bleaker scenes in the history of cinema, but I would not care to see them.”
Anthony Lane im New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/22/fighting-monsters
