They
are like the code-talkers of criminal capers. A corrupt Romanian police
inspector has been sent to the Canary Islands to learn the ancient aboriginal
whistling language known as El Silbo. The crooks he is in metaphorical bed with
suspect his police and prosecutor colleagues will assume it is only the sound
of birds chirping. He will pick up the El Silbo language quickly, but
extracting himself from his extra-legal dilemma will be considerably trickier
in Corneliu Porumboiu’s archly clever thriller, The Whistlers, which
opens this Friday in New York.
When
Gilda the femme fatale makes contact with Cristi, the bent copper, she catches
on quicker than the audience does that he is under surveillance. She comes up
with an appropriately femme fatalle-ish justification for her presence in his
apartment, but she assures him the sex means nothing. Nevertheless, when they meet
again on La Gomera in the Canaries, he cannot help feeling something for her.
She
is part of the gang that has been bribing Cristi. Despite his inside
information, the head of the Romanian operation has been arrested, so they have
devised a plot to break him out of custody. That could leave Cristi a tad bit
exposed, but the syndicate is not too worried about him. Cristi is also rather
concerned about the abuse Gilda must take from a local La Gomera gangster. He
would like to find a way to save her from the gang, even though he is still not
sure he can trust her.
The
Whistlers is
indeed a clever little noir, with all kinds of surprises in store for viewers,
making it a radical change of pace from Porumboi’s previous cerebral features,
like The Treasure and Police, Adjective. The tone of Whistlers
is considerably cooler than the average cross-and-double-cross criminal melodrama—like
glacially cool—but it still delivers the genre goods.
Vlad
Ivanov, who memorably played the semantically intimidating copper in Police,
Adjective is perfectly cast as the drily cynical Cristi. He just looks like
a crooked cop, but he also convincingly conveys a sense of Cristi’s increasingly
conflicted motivations. Likewise, Catrinel Marlon keeps viewers happily
guessing regarding Gilda’s intentions with Cristi. Yet, maybe the best noir
work comes from Rodica Lazar, chewing the scenery with gleeful abandon as Magda,
the prosecutor who is probably more corrupt than anyone, in her own mercenary
way.
Franky,
it is a bit of a shock that this film comes from Porumboiu, because it is so
much fun. Yet, despite the long detour through the Canaries (and a brief
stopover in Singapore), The Whistlers is still a distinctly Romanian
film. In one tellingly example, Cristi instructs his mother to explain away
some of his inconveniently revealed bribe money as left-over loot from his
father, a minor official in the old Communist regime, because everyone knows
they were on the take.
You
might think you know how to whistle from watching Lauren Bacall in To Have
and Have Not, but Porumboiu and Marlon will teach you a new technique. It
is a sly lesson worth learning. Highly recommended for fans of noir thrillers, The
Whistlers opens this Friday (2/28) in New York, at Film Forum.
