Direction: Corneliu Porumboiu Cast: Vlad Ivanov, Catrinel Marlon, Rodica Lazar, Antonio Buil, István Teglas, Sabin Tambrea Original title: The Whistlers Country: Romania, France, Germany, Sweden Year: 2019 Release date: 3-19-2021 Genre : Thriller Script: Corneliu Porumboiu Photography: Tudor Mircea Synopsis: Cristi, is a policeman and at the same time a mafia snitch. From Romania he travels to the island of La Gomera to learn the rubber whistle. In Romania he is under police surveillance, and using the ancient Canarian form of communication he intends to communicate with the mafia to get Zsolt out of jail, the only one who knows where 30 million euros are hidden.
For lovers of film noir with eccentric touches.
Corneliu Porumboiu tends to simplify his scenarios (the 12:08 television station east of Bucharest, the dismantled garden of The Treasure) to leave Romanian society to the bone. The most surprising thing about La Gomera is that, for the first time, he moves away from his native country to build a sort of mestizo and disconcerting noir, which, however, is the twin sister of his best film to date, Police, adjective ( 2009). If that one closed with a long, memorable scene where the infinite nuances of the language served as a master lesson to reinterpret reality, or to configure it in a network of discourses and counterarguments that reformulated the procedural polar, here will be the whistles invented by the Guanches, an ancient tribe of the Canary Island, the eccentric language used by organized crime so that the police cannot understand them. Plane / counter plane, on either side of the law. Words, sounds: once again the codes creating their closed communities, determined to remain isolated from the world, indecipherable.
This whistled language is an ingenious leitmotif that runs through a film full of irresistible extravagances: from the unique location, one of the less touristy and more rugged Canary Islands, to the performances (with the classic Vlad Ivanov in Bressonian mode, as a corrupt policeman victim of a fatal woman, and Agustí Villaronga! as gangster boss), passing through a tone that oscillates between satire and Brechtian distancing. Sometimes it seems like one of the Coens –with her money-stuffed mattresses and her comic book villains– spoken in the Romance language; sometimes a parable about the insubstantiality of desire and greed, served cold for those who thought that the New Romanian Cinema was stuck in the practice of a sad and austere realism. In a way, she would become the commercial and accessible version of the impenetrable Malmkrog (2020), by Cristi Puiu.
