najbolje sa Slobodne zone 2014..
Director: Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy
2014 (Ukraine)
A deaf mute teenager struggles to fit into the boarding school system - deaf-school drama is shocking, violent and unique. A new student is inducted into a secret world of teenage gangs and crime in this compelling and explicit film – which unfolds without subtitles, in eerie near-silence
Miroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s The Tribe has to be the most startling and bizarre film to be presented at this year’s London film festival, where it arrives having made an appearance at critics’ week in Cannes. It is perhaps open to charges of gimmickry, but surely no one could deny its fascination. I can’t stop thinking about it. This is a grimly compelling, explicit and violent film which is also a silent movie. It is set in a crumbling state boarding school for deaf adolescents in Kiev, Ukraine: a new student (Grigoriy Fesenko) shows up and from his very first day he is inducted into a secret world of teenage gangs and crime.
There are hardly any regular classroom scenes – interestingly, one of the very few appears to be a geography or perhaps a history lesson in which Ukraine is shown prominently on a map as part of western Europe rather than Russia. The rest of the time, negligent teachers have abandoned their students to a brutal, self-governing world where the violent bullies are the rulers.
But all the rows and confrontations are conducted in sign language, and this is what accompanies the fistfights – there are no subtitles, no intertitles, no explanations. And there is no orchestral soundtrack or incidental music. The whole thing happens in eerie quiet, as if on another planet: it is like a nature documentary with the sound turned down. The film unfolds to the continuous accompaniment of shoes squeaking and shuffling on lino floors, in squalid institutional dorm corridors where the doors open outward, like animal cages. There are inchoate non-verbal whispers, or grunts and gasps of anger and pain. I couldn’t help remembering the quotation attributed to Nietzsche about dancers being thought insane by those who can’t hear the music.
The new student finds that older kids are running rackets, evolved from the officially licensed sales of toys and trinkets on trains, through which they raise money for the school. Long ago, this business and the cash it raised was taken over by the tough guys who branched out into other scams – chiefly, pimping two girls out at a night-time truck stop, getting the girls to climb up into the lorry cabs while they wait blankly outside, smoking. Then the new boy falls in love with one of the girls at the exact moment her gangmasters are preparing an ambitious new business move: trafficking them out to Italy on fraudulent visas, for bigger money.
The Tribe is a demanding movie: you have to hope to understand the general gist and the larger building blocks of narrative without picking up on the minutiae – which is, interestingly, how movie-makers broadly conceive of their work in its early stages. There were moments where I confess I wasn’t exactly sure what was happening. Two big guys get a younger guy to strip – are they looking for weapons? Money? (There’s another, clearer scene where a victim has to empty out his shoes to show an absence of hidden cash.) Or maybe … gang tattoos? For me, it wasn’t entirely plain – but the demonstration of humiliation and power was crystal-clear. Slaboshpytskiy is not obviously exerting himself to make things plain for non-signing audiences, although the scene in which the two young women put on Italy-themed T-shirts was there artificially, I suspect, to make an important plot-point clear to us.
But the main question is: signing is a language like any other, so why not have subtitles? How is our experience of this different from any foreign-language movie without subtitles?
The point, I think, is that their silence underscores their alienation from us. They are a different tribe: outside the law, below the salt. And their silence has something to do with the criminal code of omerta: you don’t talk. Like any group that is isolated and treated as basically inferior, the students here have been left to incubate their own microbes of violence and pain. It is a bleak but simple picture – at times it looks like Slaboshpytskiy draws on Samuel Beckett or Peter Brook to create a universal language of anxiety. What an intriguing film.
