The Boys in the Cage
Magnolia
Pictures
One of the Angulo brothers
in a home-made Batman costume, in Crystal Moselle’s The Wolfpack, 2015
Though they are set at
opposite ends of the earth and represent opposed forms of cinema, The
Wolfpack and The Tribe have much in common. Both new films share a
concern with male-dominated groups vying for power inside what Nietzsche called
“the prison house of language”; they also have interchangeable titles that
might be more appropriate if they were flipped.
A documentary made by
American filmmaker Crystal Moselle, The Wolfpack concerns a large family
that, self-isolated for years in a New York City housing project, developed its
own tribal culture largely based on Hollywood blockbusters. The Tribe, a
first feature by Ukrainian director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy, is a fiction film
set mainly within the dog-eat-dog confines of a Kiev boarding school for
hearing-impaired adolescents and played out entirely in sign language by
amateur, similarly impaired actors.
Both movies were greeted
with acclaim at important film festivals. The Tribe won the top prize in
Cannes’s “Critics Week” section in 2014; The Wolfpack was awarded the
grand jury prize for documentary earlier this year at Sundance. While either
work might be described as a human interest story, with a good measure of
tabloid sensationalism, neither seems likely to elicit the same enthusiasm in a
general audience (although The Wolfpack does at least have a happy
ending). It’s the novel use of the motion picture medium, inviting a double
consciousness—which is to say, a critical awareness of how they were made—that
makes both films of particular interest to filmmakers and professional
movie-goers.
As one of Moselle’s
subjects explains, “the movies helped us create our own kind of world.” The
filmmaker herself got the break of a lifetime when she came upon the six
look-alike Angulo brothers striding through the East Village, long hair
streaming down their backs, all wearing sun-glasses and dressed in outfits
clearly inspired by the criminal band in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs.
It was as though, on one of this self-named Wolfpack’s first forays together
into the outside world, they were hoping to be discovered—and they were.
Raised almost entirely
within the confines of the family apartment, high above Delancey Street, the
brothers—then in their late teens and early twenties—and a single, mentally
handicapped sister, had been forbidden by their paranoid and most likely
abusive father Oscar Angulo to venture alone into the world. (Oscar was afraid
of contamination. In a way he was performing a version of the experiment
reported by Herodotus where, in order to ascertain whether language was innate,
an Egyptian pharaoh had two children brought up without ever hearing human
speech.) In the absence of conventional socialization, the boys, all given
Sanskrit names, came to know the world through rented DVDs, Oscar’s Peruvian
version of Hare Krishna Hinduism, and the home-schooling provided by their
mother Susanne, a Midwestern hippie.
Magnolia Pictures
The Angulos watching a
movie in their Lower East Side apartment in The Wolfpack, 2015
Moselle met the Wolfpack
soon after they had broken free of Oscar’s regime but the first half of her
film, which was made over a period of four years, is devoted to reconstructing
the family’s isolation, as explained by the Angulos—who are not nearly as feral
as their upbringing might suggest. The family apartment may be cluttered but it
isn’t squalid or depressing; the walls are covered with crayon sketches and
other evidence of the creativity within. The first scene has one of the Angulo
boys is transcribing the dialogue from Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. “It
makes me feel like I’m living, sort of,” he laughs; later we see part of a VHS
tape of their version of The Dark Knight, complete with homemade
costumes.
Mukunda Angulo, the Wolfpack’s
apparent leader, describes his first solo voyage from the apartment, wandering
the streets and visiting a bodega wearing a mask modeled after the one worn by
the monster in Halloween. Unsurprisingly, he was soon apprehended by the
police and taken to Bellevue. The cops subsequently raided the Angulo
apartment, where they were surprised to find only prop weapons. This is all in
the past. The boys, many of whom have taken new names, are surprisingly and
increasingly “normal” as Moselle films them at the beach, visiting an apple
orchard, and, most significantly, making their first trip to a movie theater.
Oscar, for his part, seems to have retreated into an alcoholic stupor.
The Tribe is the opposite of an escape story, except in so far as the filmmaker
has succeeded in liberating cinema from the tyranny of the spoken word.
Slaboshpytskiy’s unsettling feature concerns a new student (or inmate)—around
16 years old—who falls in with the school’s ruling criminal clique. The movie
is leisurely as well as graphic in its representation of sex and violence and,
predicated on long takes, is visceral in a wholly unexpected way.
Observing the deaf without
approximating their experience, The Tribe has no subtitles; it’s only
fully comprehensible to someone familiar with Russian sign language. At the
same time, the sounds that the characters cannot hear take on a heightened
presence. Speech isn’t made material—it is material, always on the verge
of physical contact and punctuated by percussive slaps that alert us when the
characters are “yelling.”
Drafthouse
Films
Deaf students fighting in
Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s The Tribe, 2015
Like Werner Herzog’s 1971
documentary Land of Silence and Darkness, The Tribe unfolds in an
alternative universe. By the time the protagonist has his first class, the audience
has become hypersensitive to sound, attentive to the forms of silent disruption
and mockery practiced by the students. We never see the inside of a classroom
again; the new boy’s lessons are, as it were, learned on the street. Two female
students change into hooker outfits and are driven off in a van to be pimped to
truckers. The protagonist subsequently becomes involved with one of them, with
appalling results.
The Wolfpack frustrates the viewer’s expectations as well. I certainly would have
liked to see more of the Angulo family’s homemade films and Moselle leaves
unexplored numerous questions regarding Oscar’s philosophy and his manner of
enforcing discipline. Even more mysterious is the method Oscar and Susanne used
to game the system (something all too clear in The Tribe). Getting what
appears to be a four-bedroom apartment in public housing is no small
accomplishment, especially since Oscar claims to be opposed on principal to
holding a job. The Angulo family finances are similarly enigmatic—the
explanation that Susanne was paid to oversee her brood’s home schooling is
tantalizingly incomplete.
These questions are
subsumed in The Wolfpack’s stunning testament to the redemptive power of
cinema. Just as the Angulo boys saved themselves through the production of
elaborate home movies, the filmmaker’s intervention is shown as entirely
beneficial, not least when she documents Susanne telephoning her mother for the
first time in fifty (!) years: “I have seven children!” she excitedly reveals.
Finally, newly inspired by the documentary in which they appear, the Angulo
boys are shown producing a new movie, featuring an attractive young woman,
perhaps to be premiered at next year’s Sundance Film Festival.
Where The Wolfpack
celebrates cinema as we know it, The Tribe dismantles it. Slaboshpytskiy
has called the film his “homage to silent movies.” The Tribe is as
predicated on movement as a ballet—every conversation precipitates a flurry of
expressive facial and hand gestures. It can be a bludgeoning experience, yet to
watch it is to ponder the primacy of visual experience and its presumed
universality.
In their way, The
Wolfpack and The Tribe represent the classic Lumière/Méliès
dichotomy—do motion pictures reflect or construct reality? The opposition has existed
since the medium was invented. But here there is a twist. The Wolfpack
is a documentary that delights the viewer with proliferating fictions. The
Tribe, more brutal, is an invented story founded on a discomfiting bedrock
of documentary truth.
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/jun/30/wolfpack-tribe-boys-in-cage/
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