A taciturn-looking, middle-aged man on a boat looks out onto the water. It is a gorgeous, sun-kissed day, with only a few wisps of clouds in the azure skies. He sees ocean water crashing against high rocky cliffs. Soon, he sees a settlement — some buildings, some cars, some people. The boat docks at a harbor. One by one, the passengers file out of the boat. Finally, so does the man, wearing a charcoal suit and a sober expression. A voice on the harbor’s PA system announces that he has arrived at La Gomera, “the pearl of the Canary Islands.”
He is Cristi (Vlad Ivanov), a single, childless detective who is something of a double agent, and he is the protagonist of The Whistlers, an artful, occasionally Hitchcockian film from Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu now streaming on Amazon Prime. Cristi doesn’t have much time to enjoy the breathtaking scenery of La Gomera’s harbor; almost as soon as he steps off the boat, he is met by Kiko (Antonio Bull), who tells him to turn off his phone because the police are listening. Our ears perk up: This is not typically the first thing someone tells us when we arrive at a new destination.
Kiko takes Cristi to meet Gilda (Catrinel Marlon), a Penelope Cruz look-alike with all the hallmarks of a classic film noir femme fatale: always wearing red, always with a cigarette in her fingers, always asking for money, always scheming with unclear ends in mind. “Forget what happened in Bucharest,” she tells him in Romanian on showing him his room. “I did it for the surveillance cameras.” Our ears perk up again. Who is this woman and what is she referring to?
The film flashes back to an event that occurred some time ago in Romania. Gilda asked Cristi to help get someone named Zsolt out of prison and then to come with her to the Canary Islands. During their meeting in his Bucharest apartment, Gilda asks him about a landscape painting he has hanging up opposite his red sofa. He dodges the question. His apartment, in fact, is under surveillance, and the painting, of a snaking river winding toward a sharp-angled mountain, is one of the surveillance devices being used to monitor him.
The film then flashes forward again to the Canaries. Porumboiu introduces this next scene (as he did the previous one) with bright-red title cards, evoking silent films as well as Quentin Tarantino. This scene is titled “El Silbo” (“the whistling”). Kiko, Cristi, and Gilda are sitting together in a living room. Kiko has a special talent — he can communicate through whistling — and tries to teach it to Cristi. “The whistling language is a code, like a Morse,” he explains in English so difficult to understand it almost needs subtitles. “Everything we speak can be whistled. And if the police hear the language, they will think the birds are singing.” Kiko tells him about the first inhabitants of the island, the ones who invented the whistling language. Kiko can say almost anything through whistling, but Cristi can barely whistle at all.
The next title card, a bright yellow one, introduces us to Zsolt Nagy, the owner of a mattress factory that did business with Venezuela. Someone tipped off the police that he was laundering money and hiding $30 million in cash in his factory. Cristi was tasked with finding out everything he could about Zsolt and returned to his superior with a binder full of material on this apparently inveterate criminal. But the police don’t yet have enough material to obtain a search warrant. Cristi’s superior tells him to plant some cocaine on Zsolt so that he can be arrested. Cristi refuses, saying such an act would be illegal.
We return again to the Canaries and to Kiko, introduced with a green title card, who is not making much progress in teaching Cristi how to whistle. (Later, Gilda will teach him how to whistle with slightly more success, and in an even later scene, another man will further refine Cristi’s whistle speech.) When Gilda comes back into the house, Kiko angrily grabs her by the back of her head and pushes a gun against her temple, demanding to know where the money is (what money?) and why she called the police (when?). Here, the story truly starts to develop. Literally with a gun to her head, Gilda begins to disclose to Kiko, and to us, what exactly has been happening, including her involvement with Zsolt, leading to Cristi’s next line of business concerning Zsolt and to the escalation of the plot.
From a technical standpoint, The Whistlers is outstanding, with unhurried pacing, unshowy camerawork, and splendid cinematography featuring mist-shrouded mountains, windswept palm trees, tree-lined roads, and shadowy interiors. Like many film noirs, however, the movie has a story that is somewhat convoluted and at times hard to follow. People seem to change positions without rhyme or reason. It is difficult to get a handle on who anyone truly is and what exactly is occurring at any given moment, or why people are asking for money and where the money is coming from. Characters are inserted into scenes without being properly introduced or explained. We get somewhat of a payoff once we learn how the whistling language (and opera) functions in the plot, but not as much of one as we would have hoped for.
The Whistlers, with its surveillance motif, bears some resemblance to The Lives of Others (2006), one of the greatest films of the past 25 years. The Lives of Others has a compelling story about love, espionage, art, and freedom that draws us into the movie and leaves us thinking about the characters for months (and, in my case, years) after. The Whistlers, however, has a story that all too often has us asking, “What is going on here? And why? And how much longer is this movie, anyway?”
Daniel Ross Goodman is a writer living in New York, where he is a Ph.D. candidate at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He is the author of the forthcoming book Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema.
