Melody makers

THE WHISTLERS Thrills, titters and tunes in a captivating film noir...

You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve?” said Lauren Bacall’s Vivian Rutledge to Bogie’s P.I. Philip Marlowe in classic film noir The Big Sleep. “You just put your lips together and blow.” Well, it’s not that easy in Corneliu Porumboiu’s Romanian noir The Whistlers, for it is set on La Gomera in the Canary Islands, where a group of criminals evade cops’ listening devices by employing a complex whistling language that sounds like birdsong.

Almost unbelievably, the language really does exist in La Gomera – it’s called Silbo Gomero – and is taught in the island’s schools for heritage value.

“I saw a documentary on French television,” says Porumboiu. “I was attracted from the beginning, and I started to read about it to get more information. I got in touch with the head of the department of the whistling language, Francisco Correa, and I went to the island and the classes. I saw a bit of technique. After I made the casting, Francisco came to Bucharest for two weeks and trained the actors. Then they kept in contact on Skype. Vlad Ivanov is good. I think I dubbed him just twice.”

Ivanov plays Cristi, a corrupt cop who has become involved in the drug-money laundering setup that he’s been investigating. His superiors soon grow suspicious, and this knotty situation becomes a whole lot, well, knottier when Cristi must leave Bucharest for La Gomera, where mattresses stuffed with cash are exported and the criminals are headquartered. Once there, he has to learn the whistling language in order to locate a missing $30m stash.

Porumboiu has always been the playful one among the otherwise sombre Romanian New Wave auteurs, but The Whistlers is his most flat-out entertaining movie yet. It shares themes – the individual and the state, the struggle to communicate, ethics and morality – with his earlier movies 12:08 East Of Bucharest, Police, Adjective and

The Treasure, and again riffs on genre. This time it is film noir that Porumboiu spies through his skewed lens, and he’s having a ball.

“From the first moment I had the idea to use this whistling language, I had in mind to make a certain type of story,” he says. “It would play with codes. The whistling language is coding normal language, and I had the feeling I had to play with codes of cinema. I went back to Night Of The Hunter, which is one of my favourite films, and also The Third Man, Double Indemnity, Laura, Gilda [the femme fatale in The Whistlers is called Gilda] and The Big Sleep. I like the Coen brothers a lot. I like Inherent Vice a lot.” He chuckles as he states the bleeding obvious. “I like film noir very much.” JG

ETA | 26 JUNE /

THE WHISTLERS OPENS THIS SUMMER.