The Whistlers review: Deliciously odd and yet too narratively knotted

Corneliu Porumboiu, a younger master of Romanian cinema, may have made an inclination towards the mainstream with this zippy, twisty, confusing exercise in double-bluff. We hedge bets with a “maybe” because, though the film is flashier than Porumboiu’s 2009 gem Police, Adjective, it is, if anything, weirder and harder to classify.

Hanging around a sophisticated heist, The Whistlers gives us a corrupt cop, a femme fatale and a globe-trotting plot that never walks when it can do the tarantella. Yet there is always a sense that the director is sitting back from the action and seeking the ironic undercurrents. It’s a thriller, but it’s also a discourse on the possibilities of language.

Vlad Ivanov, who was so good in Police, Adjective, returns as Cristi, a policeman visiting La Gomera, an island in the Canaries, to learn the El Silbo language. A quick glance at your favourite online dictionary will reveal the seeds of Porumboiu's peculiar project. El Silbo is constructed of complex whistles that require the speaker (if that is the word) to insert a finger in the mouth – as if cocking a gun – and blow creatively around it.

We eventually get some idea of Cristi’s scheme, but before that there is much to do with sleek Gilda (Catrinel Marlon), hoodlum Paco (Agustí Villaronga) and – here we get to the core of the protagonist’s dilemma – a dodgy businessman called Zsolt (Sabin Tambrea), who has ended up in jail.

It is no accident that the most dangerous female shares a name with Rita Hayworth’s most famous creation. The Whistlers spreads around love for golden-era Hollywood as it revels in the obliqueness that has defined Romanian cinema since its renaissance at the turn of the century.

We get a sight of The Searchers. Genres are slapped on top of one another as drunken whist players might whack down cards. Now it’s a smooth Hitchcockian shocker. But this fellow has trumped it with a contemporary western. The whistling language would, if the film were not already singular enough, add enough weird romance to mark out original territory.

The Whistlers, which debuted to acclaim at last year’s Cannes, does ultimately becomes too narratively knotted to sustain unqualified interest. But that delicious oddness – worked in with consistently original performances – demands the alert viewer’s attention.

Might there still be time to get Catrinel Marlon into the upcoming James Bond film?

Streams on Curzon Home Cinema from May 8th.