SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL: Last year an Australian documentary about the Ukraine feminist group Femen painted the former Soviet republic as tantamount to a giant brothel, so restricted are the options for its young women. (It was titled, somewhat ironically, Ukraine is Not a Brothel.)
Most of the discussion around this bleakly powerful and highly formally composed Ukrainian feature The Tribe has centered on the hearing impairment shared by all of its characters (more on this in a minute). But above and beyond it strikes this viewer that director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s central concern is to make a statement about the state of his country that is as pessimistic and despairingly coal-black as he can possibly make it.
The action takes place in a school for the hearing impaired, although other than a brief sequence near the opening (significantly, a civics lesson on the European Community), there’s hardly any teaching to be seen. This is other than in criminal activities like prostitution and the bashing and robbing of strangers, the proceeds shared by a circle of adults who get some of the students to do their dirty work for them much in the manner of Dickens’ Bill Sykes.
The protagonist - whose name we never learn, of course - is a new student. He’s a teen in a black jacket who is picked on the moment he arrives by the pupils involved in what, as it quickly becomes clear, is a crime syndicate operating inside the school. Soon he’s helping pimp out two female students (who seem perfectly willing to comply) to truck drivers, and helping to ambush and viciously beat up customers and steal their shopping as they walk home from the supermarket. The young women are hoping to get to Italy and they see it as their chance at freedom and money, yet it’s hard to escape the suspicion they’re in danger of being trafficked as sex slaves.
The film’s conceit is that its characters ‘speak’ in sign language throughout, yet no subtitles are provided. We don’t get to understand what they’re saying. It seems to me there are three way of thinking about this device. The least useful, though perhaps the most obvious, is to see it as primarily about giving the audience, most of whom will be part of the hearing population, a sense of what it’s like to be deaf and unable to readily communicate with people from outside a small enclosed group.
I don’t deny that the hearing impaired will watch the film with an especially keen interest and find things in it that bypass the rest of us. But I don’t think at heart the film is really that interested in the deaf. That would require humanist impulses, and this is a nihilistic film above all else. The hearing impairment and sign language is really a formal device, one designed to work in two different ways: firstly as a metaphor, and secondly as an attempt at reviving the principles of silent cinema.
Metaphorically, the characters represent the dark heart of the Ukraine and the important aspect of their deafness is that it makes them members of an enclosed society, a group cut off from the world around them.
The narrative is surprisingly easy to follow, precisely because Slaboshpytskiy has constructed it that way by following a relatively simple story requiring only visual language. If we don’t follow the details of the conversations, it’s because we’re not meant to - they’re unimportant. If the film has copious sex and violence, it’s hardly surprising - that’s what’s left when you depend on the body for your primary cinematic communication.
It’s not quite true to say the film is silent, however, more like strangely hushed. Unlike Marlee Matlin in Children of a Lesser God or The West Wing, these students don’t try to do a hearing impaired version of verbalising. They don’t need to, because apart from the opening scene, where the protagonist asks for directions at a bus stop, they speak only to one another. What they do is express themselves with their language’s highly demonstrative hand movements. Often, we sense, they’re doing the equivalent of shouting at one another. Palms and fists shake and swish through the air and slap against flesh. The sound design is vivid, and like no other films’.
Slaboshpytskiy holds back the camera, always – there is not a single close up. Many sequences are composed symmetrically. Less successful is the film’s adherence to extremely long takes, where the shot is allowed to go on way past the point where it has communicated all it has to give. Here the film turns what is already a bleak story into something akin to an endurance test. The film’s real strength, I suspect, will emerge in the way it lies in the memory. It’s hard, in some ways, to take. Yet, it is also so inventive and so unbendingly determined that it will be equally hard to erase from the mind.
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