The Whistlers: Film Noir Romanian-Style
Saturday, November 30, 2019 at 4:00PM by Cláudio Alves
As Noirvember comes to an end, it's interesting to peruse the current Awards hopefuls in search of some examples of film noir. Lynn Lee already defended the merits of Edward Norton's Motherless Brooklyn, but my attentions were drawn, as usual, to the Best International Feature category. Amid the record-breaking 91 submissions, we can find a peculiar experiment of deconstructed noir archetypes and mechanisms. It comes from one of those countries whose historical lack of a nomination is an absurdity and reflects poorly on the Academy.
I'm talking, of course, about Romania's The Whistlers…
Of the great auteurs of the Romanian New Wave, Corneliu Porumboiu has always shown himself to be the most adept at comedy. His cinematic dissertations on the state of his nation's society and troubled history never run away from absurdity or grotesque satire. More importantly is the director's vague sense of optimism, even when the formal language he employs suggests the bleakest social realism. Think of the rays of hope that close The Treasure or the melancholic smiles Infinite Football so deftly provokes. When confronting the paradigms of neo noir, Porumboiu doesn't alter his usual attitude of hopefulness in the face of social despondency nor his propensity for the absurd.
Indeed, The Whistlers very premise might elicit some smiles from the unexpected viewer. As it happens, there's an island in the Atlantic called La Gomera where the population has developed a language made up of codified whistles. That's where Cristi is going. He's our protagonist and, in great noir tradition, he's also a corrupt detective whose diseased moral center is put out of sorts by the enchantments of a sensual femme fatale. The criminal organization for which he works in secret wants Cristi to play a part in the break-out of a prisoner and there's an epidemy of moles, not to mention the omnipresence of spy cameras and bugged telephones.
Porumboiu uses the insanity of the scheme and the constant threat of surveillance to define all his characters as actors within the film. They're always playing through countless layers of deception and obfuscation, working as cast members for the epics of mundanity being recorded by the many hidden devices. There's a stilted quality to even the most basic of interactions and much of the film's humor comes from this bizarre form of meta cinema. Because of that, it's easy to reduce everyone to their archetypes within the universe of pulpy narratives and film noir, something the characters seem to consciously play up.
The Whistlers' story gets more and more complicated as it goes along, spiraling into the sort of byzantine plotting that makes films like The Big Sleep such mysterious classics. In another nod to noir, Porumboiu makes heavy use of flashbacks, hopping through the chronology until it all coalesces in a bloody climax. In the meantime, to give some semblance of order to this affair of intersected schemes and palimpsests of false truths, Porumboiu divides the story into chapters, each nominally dedicated to a different character.
If only the film paid every character the same attention it does Cristi. Despite those chapter titles, The Whistlers never stops being the adventure of a dirty cop and every other personality on-screen is thus flattened into the unidimensional mechanism they play in his story. The cast does brilliant work defying this script directive and Catrinel Marlon is especially good at adding layers to her portentously named femme fatale, Gilda. However, when so much of the emotional denouement depends on that character's fate, the anemic characterization cannot be fully compensated by virtuosic acting.
All in all, The Whistlers is a film that impresses and fascinates more than it engages or enamors. As a deconstructed noir in the style of the Romanian New Wave, it's an object worthy of study and much appraisal, especially for those of us who adore the genre. Porumboiu's games are easy to see and the perfection of their technical execution is awe-inspiring even if doesn't stir up any strong sentiment. Still, it'd be impossible to begrudge The Whistlers a hypothetical Oscar nomination. It's about time a Romanian film gets that honor and, among his peers, Porumboiu would be a great representative of the country's cinema and its idiosyncrasies.
Can The Whistlers become Romania's first successful Oscar contender?
Reader Comments (5)
When the film opens to Iggy Pop you know this isn't your typical Porumboiu film. It's a lot of fun, though, if lacking in the formal finesse and tonal precision of his better work. Still might have my favorite ending of the year.
Interesting. What role does the native language play in the film? I watched a short documentary about it and the language that your can sometimes "hear" behind the whistles is Spanish.
Marcos -- Most of the film is in Romanian, but there's also some Spanish. Regarding the whistles, different characters whistle in different ways. There are some that only whistle in Spanish. Cristi, however, whistles in a phonetic adaptation of Romanian while Gilda whistles in both Romanian and Spanish. Her role as a translator between different whistles becomes an important part of the plot as it surges to its conclusion.
Thank you for the information, Cláudio! That's fascinating!
Thanks for calling attention to one of my favorite films of the year! I was not awed by the film when I saw it but like most films that stay in my consciousness for years, The Whistlers stayed with me -- haunted me even -- with its mix of bizarro, Matt Adrian's quietly hilarious art, and what you said, a deconstruction of a recognizable genre. I like noir like many of us here in TFE but it takes someone immersed in its cinematic language and turn it around and still maintain the mood throughout despite the zaniness of what's happening onscreen. Porumboiu is a skilled technician with the smarts to both defamiliarize something familiar.
The music, the ensemble acting, the humor, the betrayals and that surprise ending all came together satisfyingly to give this oddball noir it's own world where language is not spoken as much as whistled, sometimes with violence, sometimes with surprising tenderness.