The Whistlers ★★ ½
The Whistlers
Cast: Vlad Ivanov, Catrinel Marlon Director: Corneliu Porumboiu Duration: 1 h 37 m
In Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket, Owen Wilson and Robert Musgrave signal to each other through bird calls — Wilson’s a raucous “cawcaw” and Musgrave’s reply a weedy “hoot!” This in spite of the fact that they are in plain sight of one another.
More recently, in Kelly Reichardt’s new release First Cow, set in the 1820s, two dairy- thieving miscreants devise a similar plan. One will milk the cow in the field; the other will look out from a tree, giving an owl’s hoot as warning in case someone happens by.
They’ve got nothing on The Whistlers, the latest from Romanian writer- director Corneliu Porumboiu. Detective Cristi ( Vlad Ivanov) travels to the Canary Islands to learn “el silbo,” a whistled language that allows the initiated — silbadors, as they’re called — to communicate over vast distances on the mountainous island, like courting canaries.
El silbo is an actual dialect, and would seen to be a perfect fit for Porumboiu, the director of 2009’s Police, Adjective, which also featured a cop named Cristi, and whose climax involved two police officers tussling over definitions in a dictionary.
Alas, I think I’d rather watch a documentary about the history of el silbo than this convoluted tale of corrupt cops and robbers that jumps from sunny Spain to dour Romania before ending with a flourish in Singapore.
The problem is that Porumboiu has focused his unique talents on telling a fairly ordinary gangster tale, full of money- stuffed mattresses, surveillance cameras, and more crosses and double-crosses than the Vatican’s gift shop. Central to the story are Cristi and Gilda (Catrinel Marlon), whose bilingualism makes her the perfect go-between; in one scene he whistles to her in Romanian, and she passes it along to her colleagues in whistled Spanish.
But the choppy nature of the narrative makes The Whistlers a difficult story to follow. I missed the Cannes screening, but I’d like to think it was greeted with whistles from European critics, for whom the sound means “not good enough!”
The Whistlers is a perfectly serviceable modern gangster noir, complete with a scene set in a cinema, where two characters meet in secret while John Ford’s The Searchers plays on the screen and John Wayne drawls: “Well, Reverend, looks like you’ve got yourself surrounded!”
And there’s a tense scene in which Cristi is introduced to el silbo; his tutor tells him he needs to put a knuckle in his mouth as though he’s holding a gun with the bullet set to exit by his ear. Myself, I’ve always been more persuaded by Lauren Bacall’s instructions: “You just put your lips together and blow.” ΠΠ1/2