In an age of streaming and ubiquitous screens, there’s a lot of talk about the death of cinema. Perhaps the age of using larger-than-life figures made of whirring and of light to work through social, historical and cultural issues has disappeared.
Towards the end of The Whistlers, the newest feature from Romanian auteur Corneliu Porumboiu, bumbling policeman Cristi (Vlad Ivanov) meets his boss in a shadowy auditorium where John Ford’s The Searchers plays out upon the screen. It’s a good place to parlay because it’s basically empty and loud enough to conceal the sound of a whispered bribe. The scene suggests that cinema is basically a relic and little more than background noise, a tiny echo bouncing around in the abyss.
It’s a good thing, then, that The Whistlers spends its duration in that abyss with Cristi and his world of hardened criminals, double crosses and limitless corruption. At the beginning of the movie, he’s ferrying his way over to the Canary Islands—sunlit, rocky, isolated—to solve the problems of a Venezuela-to-Romania drug-smuggling operation in which he’s played a major role. The solution involves learning a language of whistles, El Silbo, to help communicate discreetly back in Romania and free a member of the operation, Zsolt, from prison.
We learn this information through both a number of increasingly tense scenes that unfold in the Canaries and a series of flashbacks to Romania that spotlight Cristi’s many strategic errors (hiding his share of the money in his mother’s cellar, badly pretending to be on the same side as his cop colleagues). The film includes eight sections of varying length, each named after a key character or idea: Gilda (the syndicate’s inscrutable and elegant kept woman, played by model and Olympic gold-medalist Catrinel Marlon), El Silbo, Zsolt, Kiko (Gilda’s irascible warden), Mama (Cristi’s disappointed mother), Paco (the metaphor-loving leader of the crime syndicate), Magda (Cristi’s ambitious boss, a part inhabited with great ferocity by Rodica Lazar) and Cristi. Each of these sections, introduced by vivid intertitles in Skittles-approved colors, introduces us to table-turning twists and betrayals specific to the character at its center.
This sort of structure is a throwback to both ‘90s thrillers and interconnected-character arthouse fare from the aughts, but The Whistlers doesn’t quite fit into those categories. It functions neither as a puzzle for viewers to piece together nor as tragic melodrama to pull at their heartstrings. Instead, it adopts the style of hardboiled fiction: terse and direct, with just enough poetry to hint at an alternative to otherwise widespread decay. Cristi’s attempt to escape from the islands, for example, is halted without fanfare. A long shot shows the headlights of his stolen vehicle lighting the rugged terrain in miniature: it briefly but dramatically reveals Cristi’s precarious position, insignificant yet utterly visible, before he’s forced to a sudden stop.
Porumboiu’s hard-boiled idiom doesn’t move the film away from the idea of cinema but instead emphasizes the circulation of movies—their clichés, their oppositions, their ideals—through everyday life. The characters represent various types (the femme fatale, the mob boss, the sadistic motel owner), because how could they not? They have nothing else on which to hang their existential vestments. Cristi ends up as the in-over-his-head detective, not because he wants to be this character (actually, he will use El Silbo to resist its limitations) but because it is what life, a reflection of cinema and not the other way around, has set out for him.
Cinema also determines the movie’s vicious climax, a magnetic piece of parallel editing that shuttles us between two bloody showdowns, a Western-style shootout that takes place on an abandoned film set and a Psycho-inspired knife fight. The Whistlers isn’t so cynical as to empty such scenes of excitement. In fact, Porumboiu, who has tended to work in an ultra-realist mode that favors long takes, dives into the action headlong by way of a fleet-footed editing tempo and blood-spewing close-ups. He effectively gets us invested in its mysteries, too: we question where Cristi’s shifting allegiances really lie, and we’re left to wonder about the significance of a gunshot, heard but not seen, in the final minutes.
These investments reveal the position of The Whistlers as a paradoxical one. It’s clearly excited by cinema as a conveyor of pulsing thrills, but it’s equally critical of contemporary existence as reliant on those same thrills. Corruption is titillating, ineluctable, isolating—this leaves Gilda and Cristi as prisoners of both their own failed misconduct and their literal captors, who surveill them ceaselessly.
The Whistlers is similar to arthouse/genre hybrids like Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin and Julia Ducournau’s Raw, which both show the central position of violence in a world of entrenched power imbalances that run along veins of gender, class and sexuality. While violence becomes a form of resistance in those works, Porumboiu’s movie instead indicates that the best chance of escape resides in the whistling to which its title alludes. That whistling inhabits a space between language and song, unintelligible to opponents and as expressive of human desire as faces projected on a big screen.
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