#139: The Tribe
Part of the Top 150 Films series
The Tribe is the most recent film on this list, but could have been made any time after the Steadicam’s invention, and especially before the Soviet Union’s collapse, where its political resonances would have had even greater power. Its central conceit — a teenage gangster film set in a boarding school for deaf children told through un-subtitled Ukrainian sign language — sounds impenetrable, but it’s the film’s sheer watchability in spite of scholastic misadventures, immigration turmoil, and sexual awakenings and suppressions that elevate it to genius. Slaboshpytskiy manages the amazing double feat of coaxing incredible performances out of his non-professional actors and coordinating a technological feat of lensing and cutting to produce the maximum tension. It’s these twin elements that enable us to always understand the action, plot and metaphor, despite the idiomatic approach The Tribe uses to get us from A to B in one piece (and just barely)!
