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Rating: What immense balls the first lines. What immense balls not knowing where to start and how to stop the cerebral blender full of things to say. And there are quite a few things to say about a film like The Tribe. Strange for a film that doesn't "say" anything because, for those who don't know, the film is entirely done in Ukrainian sign language, without subtitles, without voiceover, without auxiliary words.
For a simpleton like me, it's easy to be scared with a premise like this. Just as it's easy to take back everything once swallowed by a potential commercial trick, shouting masterpiece.
Fortunately, The Tribe is neither boredom nor trickery. Released in 2014, presented at Cannes, provoking predictable clamor and hype, it presents itself as an absolute novelty, telling a micro society, telling violence, telling relationships through physical contact and the visual impact of gestures, with disarming sincerity.
It's not a story acted in sign language, but the story of the newcomer Sergei in an educational structure entirely dedicated to deaf-mute boys-students, or more specifically, his entry into the gang that reigns and dictates law within the institute.
Moving hastily and prematurely to the overall judgment, one cannot ignore the style choice, the origin of the actors, and other significant factors, to be able to comprehensively evaluate the film in question, just as it was, who knows, for Caesar Must Die. Here too, we are faced with a true test; the entire cast consists of non-professional deaf-mute actors, accustomed to making their bodies speak and conveying the entire range of emotions that humans have at their disposal.
Without spoiling too much: the film opens with a static shot at a bus stop, showing the protagonist asking a passerby for information. The viewer is immediately blocked, muffled, does not hear, does not understand, gets scared. Only with the following long take will they intuit that he was asking for information to reach the institute where most of the film will take place. The real strength of the film is in the narrative understanding:
it is impossible to fully understand the dialogues, but there is not a single point of the script that eludes, and there is not a single point of the script explained immediately. As if each sequence explained the previous one. And the feeling of disorientation that permeates the film alternates with the empathy created with the protagonists, as soon as we understand what is about to happen or what has just happened.
When integration disappears completely, what remains of the contact is exclusively the physical confrontation, especially for adolescents who have not been and perhaps never will be adolescents.
In essence, watch out, because there is something for the faint-hearted in this film. In essence, watch out, because the ear is of little use.
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