The Whistlers – first look review

Hav­ing emerged as the Euro­pean film move­ment du jour in the mid 2000s, it’s good to find the Roman­ian New Wave in such rude health a decade and a half on. Cor­neliu Porum­boiu, one of the scene’s key fig­ures, won the Cam­era d’Or in Cannes in 2006 and debuted his next two fea­tures at the fes­ti­val. His lat­est effort is a dif­fer­ent sort of crime sto­ry than we’re used to see­ing from him, though it still bears many of his dis­tin­guish­ing idio­syn­crat­ic traits.

In 2009’s Police, Adjec­tive, Porum­boiu explored how lan­guage can be used as a polit­i­cal weapon, and he devel­ops that idea fur­ther here. Noir-tinged and with a black­ly com­ic under­tow, The Whistlers revolves around a bent cop named Cristi (Vlad Ivanov) who becomes embroiled in a con­vo­lut­ed plot to lib­er­ate a high-pow­ered busi­ness­man who’s been banged up for laun­der­ing tens of mil­lions of Euros worth of drug money.

The film’s open­ing sequence, set to Iggy Pop’s ​‘The Pas­sen­ger’, estab­lish­es a glibly iron­ic tone. With plen­ty of skin in what is evi­dent­ly a very dan­ger­ous game, Cristi trav­els to the small island of La Gomera in the Canary Islands to learn El Sil­bo, a non-ver­bal Span­ish dialect made up entire­ly of whistling sounds. This unique cod­ed lan­guage is used by the island’s inhab­i­tants to com­mu­ni­cate across the deep ravines and wide val­leys that char­ac­terise the rugged vol­canic land­scape. To the untrained ear, El Sil­bo sounds a lot like bird­song, mak­ing it an ide­al means of exchang­ing sen­si­tive information.

But while Cristi is a quick learn­er, his mis­sion takes an unex­pect­ed turn when his com­mand­ing offi­cer, Mag­da (Rod­i­ca Lazar), catch­es wind of his sur­rep­ti­tious deal­ings. Mag­da, we soon learn, is not exact­ly squeaky clean her­self – in fact Cristi’s only real ally, the only per­son he feels he can trust, is Gil­da (Catrinel Mar­lon), a moll in the clas­sic femme fatale mould.

Char­ac­ters rou­tine­ly eaves­drop on one anoth­er yet at no point does any­one seem to have the upper hand, and thanks to the non-lin­ear struc­ture we too are left try­ing to piece all the clues togeth­er. At any giv­en moment it’s hard to know who is dou­ble cross­ing who, and to what end, which is a big part of the film’s charm.

Riff­ing fur­ther on the espi­onage genre while height­en­ing its own sense of intrigue and para­noia, the sound design clev­er­ly accen­tu­ates the myr­i­ad bleeps, clicks, trills and whirrs typ­i­cal­ly found in terse, cir­cuitous pro­ce­du­rals of this ilk. More than just back­ground tex­ture, these every­day nois­es – the ring of a tele­phone, the ding of a hotel desk bell, the crack­le of a record play­er – car­ry vital snip­pets of infor­ma­tion in a film where being tight-lipped is a virtue. Indeed, when one char­ac­ter los­es their abil­i­ty to speak it could even be count­ed as a blessing.

Addi­tion­al­ly, and very much in keep­ing with Porumboiu’s style, there are sev­er­al scenes which play­ful­ly bring the craft of film­mak­ing to the fore: an ill-fat­ed loca­tion scout­ing trip, a clan­des­tine meet-up in a Bucharest cin­e­ma where John Ford’s The Searchers is show­ing, a cli­mac­tic shoot-out on an old movie set. It all amounts to a very enter­tain­ing watch, but it’s not quite up there with Porimboiu’s best.