The name of the femme fatale is a clue. The duplicitous Gilda references a memorable character from the film noir genre, the role played by Rita Hayworth in the 1946 classic Gilda. For The Whistlers, Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu rearranged components of the noir genre in a contemporary crime drama focused on the Bucharest connection, an international network of drug trafficking and money laundering connecting Eastern Europe with South America.
The Canary Islands off northwest Africa is a good way station for the crime syndicate. Half of The Whistlers takes place on one of those island’s rocky, palm-fringed shores while the other unwinds through flashbacks in gray, overcast Romania. The protagonist, Cristi, is a bribe-taking Romanian detective who reunites on the island with one of his criminal contacts, the beautiful Gilda. He’s there to learn a whistling language peculiar to the Canary Islands, a sonic code the gang believes will be incomprehensible to the cops.
All that whistling is a tad goofy but touches on the film’s surveillance state milieu. Every phone conversation can be overheard anywhere in the world. Back in Bucharest, one of Cristi’s colleagues watched him from three cameras embedded inside his apartment (Cristi is under investigation by internal affairs). The mattress factory owned by the money-launderer Zsolt is arrayed with hidden cameras.
Of course, there is duplicity, double and triple crossing, among the crooks, and the “honest” police are willing to dishonestly frame their suspects by planting evidence. Vlad Ivanov plays Cristi with Bruce Willis’ wary toughness and model Catrinel Marlon gives Gilda an appropriately mysterious allure.
In its best moments, The Whistlers transposes film noir’s black and white shadow play into deeply hued nocturnal scenes. The screenplay is multi-lingual with dialogue in Romanian, English, Spanish and, yes, Whistling (subtitled just like the others).
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