Over the course of 130 minutes, not a word is spoken, and none of the sign language is translated. In The Tribe, we are left to interpret every interaction, every gesture, and every expression without the help of narration. The film feels like it could have been made by F.W. Murnau in the late silent period, alongside Sunrise or The Last Laugh: synchronized sound would soon be available, but some filmmakers still resisted the change.
Directors like Joseph von Sternberg argued that talkies would stunt creativity, as stories would be explained orally instead of expressed visually. Their conservatism aside, these early auteurs were somewhat right: cinema has always been better with actions than with words. The Tribe, the debut of Ukrainian writer-director Miroslav Slaboshpitsky, is a daring and experimental testament to the visual power of the medium that Murnau and von Sternberg sought to preserve.
The film could have been made at almost any point in cinema’s history, yet it fulfills the ambitions of the great silent filmmakers — to tell a story without intertitles or words — while still demonstrating the failure of many contemporary films in their lack of cinematic storytelling. Often you can just shut your eyes, sit back in your seat and understand the vast majority of the narrative. During The Tribe, you may want to close your eyes, but only because the imagery is so unbearably raw.
A boy comes to a new boarding school for the deaf and is confronted by the bullies and ring-leaders who run the school’s distribution of drugs and prostitution. As the nameless entrant (we know none of the characters’ names) begins to get involved in the routine of the criminal ring, which appears to be led by a principal and carpentry teacher, he forms a sexual relationship with one of the prostitutes. On the surface, their relations seems to depict the only altruistic acts in the entire film, yet is still based on a commercial exchange of money for sex.
The film is so meticulously ambiguous, leaving the spectator to decipher the wordless social contracts that rule this private, self-contained world. The prostitutes adhere to their classmate pimps; the classmate pimps follow the command of the principal and shop teacher. There are silent codes that rule this world and all of them are guided by barbaric self-interest.
Aesthetically, the theme and story is delivered with precise camera movements and compositions that place us as outside observers to this society. Slaboshpitsky has a unique visual style, in that he never cuts within a scene. Every scene features the camera lingering to track characters or observe statically, and we are never told that any of what we’re seeing is less than important. The long takes — a current filmmaking fad popularized by Russian Ark, Birdman, and Children of Men — are not self-indulgent or showy, but always used to serve a purpose: to create a deliberate pace that is painfully slow in the most visceral way possible.
In a scene that made me reach for the escape button on my computer, a prostitute has an abortion performed over the course of a single shot: we follow the patient onto the operating table while the woman performing the procedure walks around her house gathering the necessary utensils. The prostitute waits in the room, and we feel the agony of her anticipation. The length of the single takes makes what follows, the gritty depiction of the abortion, feel that much more immediate. In direct contrast to the suffocating silence that came before it, the whimpers of the prostitute feel amplified to a deafening effect.
Throughout The Tribe, Slaboshpitsky uses his quiet and gritty aesthetic to produce excruciating results. This is a film with no words that will leave you speechless.
