The Whistlers

Part of my coverage of the 55th Chicago International Film Festival.

THE WHISTLERS   ***

Corneliu Porumboiu

2019

IDEA:  Following a botched laundering operation he played a part in carrying out, dirty cop Cristi travels to the Canary Islands to learn a whistling language that will help him extricate a co-conspirator and recover the cash.

BLURB:  Bookended on one side by Iggy Pop and on the other by a literally symphonic spectacle of lights, The Whistlers is a distinctly different kind of film from Porumboiu, one that trades in his deadpan narrative minimalism for an incident-heavy genre exercise. Indulging in the tropes of policiers, noir, and all manner of global gangster drama, the director fills his runtime to the brim with subterfuge and double-crossings, creating a ceaseless flow of plot points whose sensationalism feels almost antithetical to the mundane durational processes that have thus far typified his work. It may lack assiduous structure and style – the film feels mostly perfunctory in at least its aesthetic execution – but lest one think the director has entirely relinquished his sensibility, The Whistlers exhibits enough of his thematic preoccupations to keep it reasonably in line with his prior studies of post-Communist Romanian life. For one, the focus on dubious authority remains in evidence, even more so than usual: from cops to criminals, nearly everyone here operates outside parameters of morality and justice, their actions rooted in systems that barely even masquerade as lawful. And in this pervasive corruption, which revolves around the convoluted fallout of a laundering scheme, Porumboiu again invokes the disorienting ideological muddle of his country, where the institutional residue of Communism intermingles indelicately with old-world piety and capitalist ideas of monetary wealth. The director is obviously having fun playing with genre conventions, and it’s enjoyable to see his bureaucratic rigmarole translated into something so lively.