Criminals and love in Ukraine

BEIRUT: One of the great obstacles facing filmmakers wanting to crack the lucrative U.S. market is language. It’s trade magazine doctrine that multiplexes there shy away from foreign films because it’s assumed their audiences won’t pay to sit through subtitled movies. By this standard “The Tribe,” the debut feature of Ukrainian writer-director-producer Miroslav Slaboshpitsky, ought to enjoy the advantage of a subtitle-free foreign film. Unfortunately for Slaboshpitsky’s distributors, the work is far more challenging than many non-American films released this year.

“The Tribe” is all the better for it.

This coming-of-age tale recounts the harrowing experiences of Sergey (if the credits are to be trusted), a teenager who enrolls at a “state-run” school for deaf-mute kids.

Slaboshpitsky and his collaborators pull no punches. Before the action starts, a terse warning informs audiences that there’s no spoken language in this movie. Its characters use sign language, without subtitles. What is to come, the warning concludes, doesn’t require translation.

The film’s opening vista is that of the anonymous bus stop where, suitcase in hand, Sergey (Grigoriy Fesenko) materializes. Gesturing to a lady, he begins a dumbshow inquiry about how to get where he’s going.

His destination is a derelict-looking institutional structure, where he arrives just in time to miss the student-faculty sign-language start-of-the-year assembly.

The first of two teachers to appear in the film is an uninspiring creature, but Sergey’s classes are secondary to finding his place in an ecosystem administered and staffed by the school’s older students.

A solid lad, Sergey demonstrates he can handle himself in a fistfight. Gang members don’t approve of the ease with which he tears into one of four attackers with his teeth – suggesting they may be affiliated with FIFA.

Having proven himself useful as an enforcer, he joins the older boys in administering the tribe’s business dealings. This is how he learns that two of his female classmates support themselves by turning tricks at a nearby rest stop for truckers.

Soon enough Sergey is pimping for the girls, and he forms an attachment to Anya (Yana Novikova).

“The Tribe” premiered a few months back at Cannes’ Semaine de la Critique, where it emerged as the big winner, walking off with three of the four competition prizes. Its Middle East premiere is Tuesday as part of the Beirut reprise of SC.

A fairly scalding experience, as movies go, it ranks among the must-see films of the summer.

Not unlike other eastern European art house features, the camera language employed by cinematographer (and editor) Valentyn Vasyanovych is as blanched as the physical and emotional landscape it depicts. Vasyanovych is most comfortable shooting from some remove – across the street, the far side of a room – lending the film its sparsely beautiful documentary aspect.

Like much of the art house cinema coming out of Europe and the Americas, “The Tribe” is designed for audiences that like to figure things out for themselves, seeking to provoke questions rather than dish out platitudes.

By this criteria, Slaboshpitsky’s debut is an impressive piece of cinema, one whose aesthetic rewards outweigh the sometimes harrowing experience of watching it.

The formal premise of the work – telling the story subtitle-free in a language that most viewers don’t understand – is effective on a few levels.

Most immediately, the gesture provides a mechanism for enforced empathy with the young protagonist. Audience disorientation – stemming from the want of linguistic cues usually afforded by dialogue and voiceover narration – nicely recreates what Sergey undergoes as he’s parachuted into his violent new home.

For film lovers whose memories penetrate back to the dark ages when cinema’s sole soundtrack was music and dialogues were communicated via inter-titles, Slaboshpitsky’s film stands as a reaffirmation of the power of a purely cinematic language.

Films populated by characters that depart from social norms are invariably read as synecdoche, a microcosm of a much broader landscape.

In this, “The Tribe” is a child of Werner Herzog’s mischievous 1970 feature “Auch Zwerge Haben Klein Angefangen” (Even Dwarves Started Small), which is set in a madhouse-like institution whose inmates and administrators are all, yes, little people.

“Dwarves” may be assumed to reflect Herzog’s rather bleak views of the human condition generally. Slaboshpitsky’s “Tribe” is more readily read as a sketch of the social and cultural landscape of his country in the wake of retrenchment, collapse, and semi-criminalization of the state.

Here, where a shop instructor supplements his income by abetting student entrepreneurialism – namely a violent train mugging and prostitution ring – and conspires with a school administrator to export student prostitutes to a foreign country, the protagonist is confronted by grim choices of inclusion and exclusion.

The entire mechanism of the place is such that individualism and love are trumped by the business interests of the tribe. The irony of Slaboshpitsky’s story is that, eviscerating as it is, it comes down firmly on the side of the individual.

It’s a brutal optimism, to be sure, twinned with isolation.

“The Tribe” screens at Metropolis Cinema-Sofil Tuesday at 8:30 p.m. The film is in international sign language without subtitles, but this doesn’t hinder access. For more information, see metropoliscinema.net