The Whistlers: Romanian director's arch and ambitious film noir is more in love with its own trickery than with characters
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B
“You know how to whistle, don’t you Steve?" said Lauren Bacall in a famous line from Howard Hawks's To Have and Have Not. "You just put your lips together, and blow.”
There's a fair amount of pursing and blowing in The Whistlers, Romanian writer-director Corneliu Porumboiu’s bumpy ride of a film-noir pastiche. Bouncing between Budapest and the Canary Island of La Gomera, in a non-chronological narrative, the film takes place in several languages: Spanish, Romanian, English and "El Silbo.” The latter is a whistling language native to La Gomera, which a culture without smartphones uses to send long-distance messages.
Catrinel Marlon is the sultry femme fatale Gilda in Corneliu Porumboiu’s The Whistlers.
Adapted from the indigenous Guanches population, the modern version of El Silbo transposes Castilian Spanish using "two vowels and four consonants" which are communicated at different pitches by bending your finger in your mouth. As one teacher explains it, it’s like putting a gun in your mouth so the bullet will come out your ear.
The studious linguistic pupil here, with his knuckle between his teeth, is a dour Romanian undercover cop called Cristi (Vlad Ivanov). He has travelled to La Gomera to learn the language from local criminals, for reasons that are gradually revealed over the course of the film: "If the police hear the language, they think the birds are singing."
Shortly after Cristi arrives in the Canary Islands, he is met by his underworld contact, a sultry brunette named Gilda (Catrinel Marlon) And yes, if you think that's a movie reference, you're right. With police surveillance cameras in his hotel room, Gilda insists she must pose as a call girl and go to bed with Cristi to preserve appearances.
From one bed to another, the plot turns around a mattress factory outside of Budapest. The owner is an incarcerated crook, Zsolt (Sabin Tambrea) who works with a crime boss named Paco (Agustí Villaronga) to ship euros out of the country to Spanish criminals. The crime group includes the whistling teacher, Kiko (Antonio Buíl) who knows a secret about Gilda and, like every other male in the movie, is trying to bed her.
With its bright colours, vacation vistas and insistent soundtrack (from Iggy Pop to opera), The Whistlers isn't quite the confection it promises to be. Progressively, the tone grows more deadpan and bewildered than dangerous and sexy.
Cristi, the protagonist, is no suave man of mystery here. He's a crooked cop in a crooked system, more or less under the thumb of two other women besides Gilda. One of them is his ruthless boss Magda (Rodica Lazar) whose own office is bugged for some reason. The other is his rather glamorous mother (Julieta Szönyi) who gets entangled in his scheme and is disappointed in her grown-up little boy.
While much more generic than Porumboiu's fabulously doleful comedies of post-Communist Romania -- 12:08 East of Bucharest and Police, Adjective - The Whistlers, shares connections with his earlier work. Cristi was the name of the cop in Police, Adjective, charged with surveilling a dope-smoking teen-ager.
Porumboiu plays with these thriller tropes to explore his familiar police-state themes: Surveillance, state corruption and the warping of language.
The Whistlers is also a film that pointedly references other paranoid films – including Gilda, Psycho and The Searchers. One scene even takes place on an abandoned movie set. During another, an American location scout knocks on a door and introduces himself as someone who admires the building where the scene is taking place. Cameras and electronic eavesdropping are ubiquitous, leaving whistling as the only form of unmonitored conversation.
Still, while you can admire the “House of Mirrors” structure of The Whistlers and its ironic mix of glum and glamorous, there is little emotional purchase here. This is a flatter, more arch experience than Porumboiu’s devastatingly absurd earlier films, and the entire exercise feels more about ingenuity than art
The Whistlers. Directed and written by Corneliu Porumboiu. Starring: Vlad Ivanov, Catrinel Marlon, Rodica Lazar, Antonio Buil, Agustí Villaronga, Sabin Tambrea, Julieta Szonyi and George Pisterneanu. The Whistlers opens at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on Friday, March 13.