The Whistlers

Yes, you may have been one of the found­ing fathers of the Roman­ian New Wave way back in the mid 2000s, but at the end of the day, you’ve got to get paid. Cor­neliu Porum­boiu has long been a dar­ling of the fes­ti­val cir­cuit, court­ing whol­ly deserved rev­er­ence in cinephile cir­cles for his acer­bic takes on polit­i­cal his­to­ry (12:08 From Budapest) clas­si­cal genre (Police, Adjec­tive, The Trea­sure) and the beau­ti­ful game (The Sec­ond Game, Infi­nite Foot­ball).

His new film, The Whistlers, sits in that sec­ond cat­e­go­ry, and sees the indus­tri­ous writer/​director take a turn for the point­ed­ly com­mer­cial. This one didn’t only made its ini­tial bow in com­pe­ti­tion at the 2019 Cannes Film Fes­ti­val, but it’s also as slick, sleek and smooth as a box-fresh Mer­cedes Benz.

Cristi (Vlad Ivanov) is a surly Bucharest-based detec­tive who doesn’t quite know which side his bread is but­tered. He is under heavy scruti­ny from his col­leagues and supe­ri­ors as he is sus­pect­ed of main­tain­ing an under­hand con­nec­tion with a dodgy mat­tress sales­man who is hid­ing €30 mil­lion from both the jack­al-like cops and crew of gang­sters based out of La Gomera in the Canary islands.

Despite play­ing it dumb, Cristi – like any noir anti-hero worth his salt – remains one hot step ahead of painful, humil­i­at­ing death, but in order to ful­ly endear him­self to the gang­sters, he must spend a quaint sum­mer in their com­pa­ny learn­ing an ancient whistling lan­guage that allows for unde­tect­ed com­mu­ni­ca­tion over long distances.

It involves scrunch­ing up your index fin­ger, shov­ing it in your mouth, blow­ing and, after some prac­tice, emit­ting a sound that’s not unlike syn­co­pat­ed bird­song. It’s a fun­ny ploy to have mod­ern crim­i­nals look back to more rudi­men­ta­ry forms of com­mu­ni­ca­tion in order to foil the mod­ern sur­veil­lance state, it’s just a shame that the whistling ele­ments form such a minor part of the narrative.

Were you to replace the whistling with 2‑way radios, it’s hard to see how it would make dif­fer­ence to how this con­stant­ly jack-knif­ing sto­ry plays out. That’s not to say the film doesn’t work: on the con­trary. It’s a rip­ping, tight­ly plot­ted polici­er which man­ages to delve into the lives of a var­ied ensem­ble of chumps, pat­sies, molls and innocents.

The men are large­ly brutish and vul­gar, but Cristi even­tu­al­ly finds him­self under the nox­ious influ­ence of three strong women: his manip­u­la­tive, casu­al­ly repres­sive boss Mag­da (Rod­i­ca Lazar); his age­ing mama (Juli­eta Szönyi); and stat­uesque manip­u­la­tor Gil­da (Catrinel Mar­lon). Despite the film’s out­er-gauze of high seri­ous­ness, it ini­tial­ly feels as if Porum­boiu is play­ing all this for laughs, with a few inspired com­ic flour­ish­es in the ear­ly stages appear­ing to set the tone.

Yet all eccen­tric­i­ty (as in, the stuff that makes a film like this seem unique) falls away as all focus is giv­en over to mak­ing sure all the dou­ble and triple cross­es pan out. The turn­ing point is a gag which sees all the mob­sters hatch­ing plans in a spa­cious, gallery-like build­ing, and they’re dis­turbed by an Amer­i­can film direc­tor in the midst of loca­tion scout­ing – it’s a punk­ish V sign flipped at dumb US genre cin­e­ma, yet when this film ends up amount­ing to not very much at all, the joke seems to be on Porumboiu.