The Tribe

The opening scene encapsulates the film. There is no music and we hear no language. The camera holds a stationary view across a city road at a bus stop. In front we see and hear a succession of cars, trucks and buses. This is the film’s characteristic shot: we are remote, detached, coolly observant of whatever is going on beyond our hearing and understanding. In the distant right is the black ruin of an old car. It’s a charred omen of the vehicles that pass, an augur of disaster. 

A young man, who will turn out to be our “hero,” suitcase in hand, asks a woman at the bus stop for direction. He produces a note to express himself. So he’s mute; her gesticulations tell us he’s deaf. 

The lad is joining a boarding school for the deaf and dumb. That first scene is the last we will see him in that presents the normalcy of our everyday life. His criminal activities will take him to a truckers’ stop and onto a train but those scenes show him working for the “tribe” he draws into at the school. Once he gets to the school he is in another world. As he is forced to immerse himself in it we’re kept far out. Watching but outside. 

The staff and students are very articulate with their gestures, panting and grunts. But we’re outside that language. We’re of another tribe so we don’t understand them. But we can figure out what’s going on. That’s because we’re of the same tribe after all. So we recognize rites of initiation, socialization, pecking orders, cruelty, exploitation and the corruption of our highest values.  

The parable of the school, its teachers — some well-meaning, some compromised — and its clearly structured gang of rough boys and sexualized girls, opens into two themes. 

The first grows out of all this prolonged, detached shots of cold observation. The tribe at this school is a microcosm of our social structure. The absence of words and music make the experience seem like a clinical study, society viewed as through a microscope. We’re detached so we can analyze the group’s dynamics — but not so detached that we don’t see it is mirroring us. 

Two scenes pack the most emotional wallop. In one our lad has sex with the blonde he has been pimping. What begins with awkwardness and fumbles ends in such a closeness she lets him kiss her. For him it’s love; for her it may or may not be. Now he can’t let himself pimp her anymore. They have another lyrical love scene, which turns ominous when he gives her a full wallet he stole on the train. At the end he bludgeons a teacher to steal money to buy her again. In that tribe he fears there is no “love” without payment.  

The second powerful scene is related: the girl’s grisly abortion. This too is shot in one continuous long-shot take, in painfully real time. For this she uses the first money he gave her. We don’t know if he knows that or not. Their relationship ends in either case. 

If the film dramatizes the essential ways of our society, if it shows one sub-culture as typifying  ours, the climax gives us another resonance. Our lad, who was such a nice, helpless victim when he arrived at he school, stumbling from one abuse to another, suffering the painful initiations, then doing the work assigned him, now rises up against his oppressors. First he assaults and robs the shop teacher who moonlights driving the girls for he pimps. Then he tries to keep his beloved whore from escaping to Italy — by eating her passport. Finally he kills the four boys who have most persecuted him. The appealing young lad turns robotic killer. We hear his continuing thumps right through the end credits — as if his march of revenge proceeds ad infinitum. Now the fable reads as the oppressed classes arising  — finally, after so much abuse — rising up in violent revolution. 

     At the end we learn the film is from the Ukraine. As the news reminds us, they know about oppression, about tribal wars, about the loss of innocence and about the savagery that persists beneath our veneer of civilization, even — or especially — among those whose disadvantages might dictate they rather aim for civility and care. But our tribe is not like that.