The Tribe is a
singularly unique film in how it is presented and in how that presentation
relates with its audience. The film has
no verbally spoken dialogue. The only
language in the film is Ukranian Sign Language.
There are no subtitles. This
means that, by purposeful design, only a very small percentage of any given
audience, most usually not a single person, will be able to understand what
anyone in the film is saying. This is a
bold creative move by director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy, one grounded in
artistic experimentalism rather than audience gratification. However, whether that artistic purpose is
achieved is very much up for debate.
To give a plot synopsis would be a disservice to the film, since
the primary point is for the audience to try and deduce the story without the
assistance of exposition or verbal cues.
Thankfully, the film is fairly archetypal, at least in early scenes,
with the characters establishing themselves via tropes already familiar to us
as connoisseurs of other cinema. This
does not make the story necessarily easy to follow, but it acts as a starting
point by which we can ground this conceptually foreign experience.
And yes, at times this works remarkably well. Even though I wasn’t able to assign names to
any of the characters, I was able to figure out their relationships to one
another and generally follow the beats of the story. Even when the film later deigns to go off the
rails into atypical territory, I was able to understand character motivations
and know why events were unfolding as they were. Even the setting, a boarding school for the
deaf, caused the surrounding community’s non-verbal gesturing to make sense,
even if it did stretch the surreality of this world to its limits.
But the experiment isn’t entirely flawless in its
execution. Whether the film is meant to
be obtuse or is merely hard to follow at times is unclear, but I do know that during particular scenes I was completely lost, only to catch up later
without any clear understanding of what I had been missing out on. The film is less interested in portraying
deaf experience than it is in visual storytelling, so the fact that the film
lost me in certain moments does not speak highly of those portions. Furthermore, as the film enters its third
act, more often than not it uses its non-verbal conceit to set-up moments of
shock horror, usually in the form of shocking violence that would likely have
made more immediate sense if we could understand just what dialogue led up to
it. The most egregious example of this
is a scene culminating in an invasive medical procedure. Even without words it is heartwrenching and
dramatic, but it seemingly came out of nowhere and was purely present to evoke
my exact visceral reaction.
Even with those caveats, though, The Tribe is worth seeing for the novelty of its experiment. It is by no means a perfect execution of its
concept and is at times blatantly manipulative of its audience, but as an
exercise of cinema as artistry, I’ve seen much worse attempts to stretch a
gimmicky concept to feature length proportions.
Just prepare yourself for some disturbing imagery and don’t expect to
walk away loving the film. It’s a
novelty act, but at least it’s a notable one.
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