The Tribe

THE TRIBE opens as Spanish human resources executive Fidel (Paco Leon) has sex in his upper floor office with an intern while the 300 people he's recently fired noisily protest in the streets below. The distraction makes it impossible for them to finish, but they find themselves unable to uncouple. They are wheeled out together, still attached, on a gurney, with his bare posterior in the air as co-workers video the departure. The spectacle goes viral, complete with a song and a humiliating nickname: Stickyman. This ruins his career, marriage, and reputation. After a year of laying low, Fidel's therapist insists he find his birth mother, Virginia (Carmen Machi), a hotel cleaning woman who had him at 16 and gave him away. The meeting goes awry. Depressed, disgusted, and uninterested in his mother, he deliberately walks in front of a moving bus as she watches. The suicide fails, but someone snatches his backpack and ID, so when he loses his memory, his vocabulary, and much of his understanding of the world, no one can figure out who he is. Virginia takes him to her tiny apartment, where her two younger sons have been mooching since the firing. Unable to leave Fidel alone, or in the care of her selfish younger sons, Virginia drags Fidel to the dance class she shares with her best friends, known as "the mommies." Fidel shows amazing aptitude at dancing and great enthusiasm for the pretty dance instructor (Maribel del Pino). Struggling with simple words and ideas, Fidel is childlike and uncensored, apt to call people "ugly" or "smelly," which makes for lots of comic moments. But he seems generally sweet and kind, so when Virginia learns who Fidel used to be -- a high-ranking corporate executive who did terrible harm -- she hasn't the heart to tell him. Fidel's biological father, Luciano (Luis Bermejo), gives Fidel a job stocking groceries at his store and is amazed to find that while Fidel has trouble speaking in full sentences, his mathematics, computer, and marketing skills are highly developed. "The mommies" earn a spot on a national talent show, with Fidel as their token male dancer, and he is outed on live television, a revelation he handles with grace and contrition. His memory returns, he owns up to the monster he once was, and tries to do better.