THENEWYORKER, MARCH 9, 2020 85
NEWYORKER.COM
Richard Brody blogs about movies.
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with Debicki—lofty, playful, and un-
readable—in especially beguiling form.
The idea that art, like love, is something
that you can make or fake, and that sur-
prisingly few people can tell the differ-
ence, will always be ripe for exploration.
And yet the movie stumbles. The book
was set in Florida, and the prettifying
switch to Italy adds languor but sub-
tracts fever; even when the plot speeds
up, in the final third, the atmosphere
feels more hasty than intense, and the
alluring promise of the early scenes, when
you couldn’t tell if the hero was fooling
the heroine, or vice versa, melts away.
They should have stayed in bed.
I
t’s been a while since whistling had
a major role in a movie. Admirers of
Hitchcock’s “The 39 Steps” (1935) will
remember the earworm stuck in Rob-
ert Donat’s brain—the musical phrase
that he couldn’t help whistling, and
that returned to him, laden with fresh
meaning, at the finale. Then there’s the
emotional pick-me-up of “I Whistle a
Happy Tune,” as sung by Deborah Kerr
(or, rather, by Marni Nixon, the queen
of dubbing), in “The King and I” (1956).
Now we have Corneliu Porumboiu’s
“The Whistlers,” the plot of which de-
mands that the characters put their lips
together and blow.
Much of the tale is set in La Gomera,
one of the Canary Islands. La Gomera
is the ancient home of El Silbo, the
nonverbal idiom by which its inhabi-
tants have traditionally made contact
across the island’s gullies and ravines.
The component sounds of Spanish
words, cut down to two vowels and four
consonants, are conveyed by whistling,
the trick being to curl your fingers
against your mouth with one finger out-
stretched, as if your hand were a gun.
That is how Cristi (Vlad Ivanov), a Ro-
manian visitor to La Gomera, is taught
the rudiments of Silbo by an expert,
who explains, “If the police hear the
language, they will think the birds are
singing.” Pastoral noir! The fact that
Cristi is the police only proves what a
heap of trouble he’s in. Still, he’s an ideal
student of Silbo, being not just a quick
learner but a taciturn sort, more likely
to clam up than to spill. The less talking
you do, in his line of work, the better.
But what is that line? There’s no risk
of my revealing what happens in Po-
rumboiu’s film, because I remain, as I
began, in the dark. All I can tell you is
that Cristi’s a bent cop, based in Bucha-
rest, and trying to operate on both sides
of the fence. He has a scary superior,
Magda (Rodica Lazar), who is battling
corruption, although she, too, is pre-
pared to flex the rules. That may be why
her office is bugged. The official villains
include a money-laundering gangster,
Zsolt (Sabin Tambrea), and his girl-
friend, Gilda (Catrinel Marlon), the
woman who sleeps with Cristi in the
interests of untruth. He warms to her,
and, at one point, they communicate
from afar in Silbo, as though it were a
natural language of love. If Cristi were
a Rita Hayworth fan, he would recall
one of the first principles of cinema:
Never, ever fall for anyone named Gilda.
There are nods to other films. We
get a scene at the Bucharest Cine-
mathèque, for example, where “The
Searchers” is showing, plus a creepy
motel clerk who may be the long-lost
Romanian cousin of Norman Bates. As
for the housefronts and vacant squares
amid which a shoot-out takes place,
they are actually the relics of an aban-
doned movie set. At moments like this,
“The Whistlers” seems to be suspended
within quotation marks—withdraw-
ing, as it were, to a discreet distance
from the demonstrably real. Some view-
ers will delight in such cleverness, but
is it really the director’s strongest suit?
More rewarding, I think, is the back-
ward glance to his own creative past:
specifically, to “Police, Adjective” (2009),
in which we first met Cristi—or a
younger instar of him, at any rate, played
by a different actor. Though already a
cop, he was as yet unbent, and thus re-
luctant to punish some poor teen-ager
with a drug charge that would mean a
life-wrecking prison term. Porumboiu,
like many of his contemporaries, was
probing the bureaucracy of post-Com-
munist Romania and finding it to be
not only infuriating but morally and
spiritually anesthetic.
The new film is definitely suaver and
busier, glinting with wit and conclud-
ing in, of all cities, Singapore. Yet there’s
still a numbness in the middle-aged
Cristi, as though the free play of his
conscience had seized up in the service
of the state. When he visits his aging
mother, she strokes him, says what a
good boy he used to be, and asks, “How
did you end up like this?” Looking at
Cristi’s face, expressively blank, you won-
der if he chose to go wrong or if he was
simply defeated and deadened in his
efforts to do the right thing. He could
whistle a happy tune, even now, but I
doubt if it would help.
