Review: The Whistlers Is a Clever, Funny, Reference-Rich Crime Caper

Corneliu Porumboiu’s film is very much a genre exercise, and a particularly Soderberghian one at that.

The Whistlers
Photo: Magnolia Pictures

The opening credits of The Whistlers are set to the jaunty, loping beat of Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger.” Like a lot of the signifiers in Corneliu Porumboiu’s clever, reference-dense crime film, the use of the song is appropriately glib. “The Passenger” continues to play as one of Porumboiu’s archetypically taciturn protagonists, Cristi (Vlad Ivanov), idles on a ferry, wholly unprepared for the criminal world he’s about to enter. Pop’s narcotic, ironically disengaged vocals exude a winking menace that will come to define the film once Ivanov’s police detective sets foot on La Gomera, the “pearl” of the Canary Islands, to assist a network of criminals by learning a language that will help them elude the police who’ve bugged their homes and telephones. The song pauses, and after Cristi has been greeted by a henchman, he’s warned to turn off his likely tapped phone and enter a sun-dappled underworld. Cristi seems capable, but once “The Passenger” resumes, the song appears to be mocking him.

Though Cristi has been around the block, he’s understandably flummoxed by this elaborate, international criminal operation. He has, with an offer of cash and a calculated tryst in his heavily monitored apartment, been quite literally seduced into this working vacation by Gilda (Catrinel Marlon), the film’s potential femme fatale. Her boyfriend, Zsolt (Sabin Tambrea), owns a mattress factory near Bucharest that’s been laundering money for gangsters in Spain and Venezuela. After Zsolt is jailed in the act of transporting this illicit cash by Cristi and his boss, Magda (Rodica Lazar), Gilda convinces Cristi to turn in hopes that she can arrange a sweetheart deal to free Zsolt. Or, perhaps, she’s under the heavy influence of the men who’ve entrusted their money to Zsolt, including boss Paco (Agusti Villaronga) and his lecherous underling, Kiko (Antonio Buíl). Cristi, like so many of Porumboiu’s hapless heroes, is a functionary suddenly called to action and forced to discover his moral compass, and then to consider whether acting justly is a luxury his culture affords him. Then again, how does he determine what the right thing to do is when no one in this scheme has pure motivations?

Though it shares some themes with Porumboiu’s prior work, which are more tethered to Romania’s history and political culture, The Whistlers is very much a genre film, and a particularly Soderberghian one at that. Mercilessly efficient and righteously cynical, the film is nested with twists that place Cristi further and further from discovering who’s manipulating the byzantine plot he finds himself enmeshed within. Cristi’s inability to make sense of his place in the very case he’s investigating is just one of the film’s cruel, quite funny jokes.

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Another is Silbo, a whistled register of the Spanish language that inspires the film’s title. Composed of a half dozen notes that each represent certain letters of the Spanish alphabet, the ancient language has been used by natives of La Gomera for generations. Critsti learns Silbo from Gilda and Kiko, who hilariously likens the whistling of the language to shaping your finger like a gun that’s going to fire a bullet out of your ear. Tellingly, any native communicators of Silbo are absent from the film. Apart from perhaps Cristi’s mother (Julieta Szonyi) and his priest, David (Ioan Coman), every speaking role in The Whistlers belongs to a character well-versed in the language of noir. They lack any semblance of authenticity, and seem to have styled their personas from Hollywood treatments of similar material.

Porumboiu largely handles The Whistlers’s persistent strain of artifice masterfully, hurtling his narrative ahead even as he’s jumbling timeframes and lingering in moments of ironic menace. Some of the film’s stranger byways include a hotel called Opera, where the desk attendant plays a section of Jacques Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann on a record player on seemingly endless loop, and an abandoned film set, which a climactic scene revitalizes as a backdrop for shootouts and double-crossings. One of the film’s most tense moments, set in a gorgeous building hollowed out into a criminal warehouse, is interrupted by a tourist who turns out to be a filmmaker (David Agranov) scouting locations for his next work.

Since his breakout, 12:08 East of Bucharest, and most explicitly in When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism, Porumboiu has centered both political history and personal duress around the creation of stories. The Treasure, from 2015, marked a transition to pure genre cinema for the director, featuring a protagonist who falls prey to a generic plot device in a last-ditch effort to change his own narrative. The Whistlers continues in this vein while incorporating some of Porumboiu’s prior nods to the process of filmmaking into his story.

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It’s not always clear why these devices exist: A riff on Psycho’s shower sequence is mystifying, as is most of the action that eventually transpires at the Opera. But a covert meetup at a cinema that’s screening The Searchers resonates as John Ford’s film flickers in front of characters whose allegiances aren’t as honest as they seem. Though The Whistlers is sometimes too liberal in its arsenal of references, Porumboiu executes his plot with a persistently low-key swagger, coaxing his actors into memorable but perfectly blank performances. They’re captivating, but their characters are so shorn of motive or conflict that you wonder why they’ve left any impression at all. By the end of the film, set at a “garden” of massive steel structures and dazzling neon lights, it seems like a digital simulacrum of beauty is, in Porumboiu’s ruthless and unsparing world, a reasonable aspiration.

Score: 
 Cast: Vlad Ivanov, Catrinel Marlon, Rodica Lazar, Sabin Tambrea, Antonio Buil, Agusti Villaronga, István Teglas, George Pistereanu, Julieta Szonyi, Cristóbal Pinto, Kio Correa, David Agranov, Andrei Popescu, Ioan Coman  Director: Corneliu Porumboiu  Screenwriter: Corneliu Porumboiu  Distributor: Magnolia Pictures  Running Time: 97 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2019  Buy: Video

Christopher Gray

Christopher Gray is a film programmer at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. His writing has also appeared in Tiny Mix Tapes.

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