MUST END APRIL 2
Screening at Row House Online
“If the Coen brothers were Romanian, they might have made THE WHISTLERS.” (A.O. Scott, NYT)
Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu’s first all-out-genre film is a clever, swift, and elegant neo-noir with an off-kilter twinkle in its eye. Cristi–an easily corruptible Bucharest police detective–arrives on the mist-enshrouded Canary Island of La Gomera, where he learns a clandestine, tribal language, improbably made entirely out of whistling. This form of hidden communication will keep his superiors off his trail as he becomes increasingly embroiled in a gangster scheme involving a Euro-stuffed mattress and a sultry femme fatale named, of course, Gilda. Full of double-crossings and unexpected twists and turns, Porumboiu’s crime drama is a sharp, dazzling, deadpan-funny caper that explores the limitations of language while at the same time using it as a poetic form of resistance.
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