Until the blood starts to drip: Florin Şerban, If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle

If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle (Eu când vreau să fluier, fluier) (2010)
Directed by Florin Şerban

If Florin Şerban’s astonishing first feature film took by surprise the critics at the Berlin Film Festival this year, creating serious expectations for the Romanian film critics and for the Romanian public, If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle eventually proved to be worthy of both his fame and the two prizes he received. Nevertheless, his straightforward style and the world it depicts didn’t look much like the films who put Romania on the world map of cinema, namely The Death of Mister Lazarescu, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days or California Dreamin’, mainly because it resembled something entirely different: the other Romanian cinema, made at the beginning of the decade, even before Romanian films became increasingly popular among European and American film critics. Seeing If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle, at least thematically you recall those years when in Romanian theaters one could see such films as Caranfil’s Philanthropy, Mungiu’s first feature film Occident or Radu Muntean’s Fury. If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle is more than vaguely similar to the latter. At the beginning of the decade that eventually established the so-called Romanian New Wave, some of the emerging voices in the Romanian cinema used to direct some rather eclectic films, with a great concern for the emotional impact of the film upon the audiences. Of course, this doesn’t necessary imply that 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days or similar films are not concerned with the audiences, though the contrary opinion seems to be vaguely popular among certain film buffs. As Cristi Mungiu tried to explain in one of the sequences of La nouvelle vague du cinema roumain, a documentary about the new voices in the Romanian cinema screened at the TIFF last year, Romanian directors often try to question certain expectations of a public fed with mainstream (mostly, American) cinema; hence, instead of a dynamic plot, you have slow development of the story, instead of omniscience, a subjective, “realistic” point of view, and so on. For them, a minimalist film is a cure. Did it work? According to some comments posted for the reviews of the latest Romanian films, as Police, adjective, it did and did not. Nevertheless, the ill-humored audiences can be sometimes surprised by their own feelings towards films like The Death of Mister Lazarescu, years after its release; it seems that, while still waiting for lighter films and plots that would not involve communism or social issues, the Romanian audiences have grown fond of some of the early efforts of the Romanian New Wave, in the process acquiring a taste for the independent European film as well.

BUT. Obviously, there is a “but”. While Romanian cinema was facing its eternal problems, raising funds and finding a distributor, the few films that did see the light of day weren’t all preoccupied with establishing a new grammar of cinema. Some of them, mainly from the first part of the decade, preferred to meet at least some of the expectations of the public. Those films were supposed to move the audiences, while adapting sympathetic characters and memorable situations to the big screen; even Cristi Mungiu has switched sides many times between arty drama and crowd-pleasing comedies, since his latest film, Tales from the Golden Age, was deliberately made for a wider audience. If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle owes a lot more to those films from the early 2000s, mixing daring ideas about filmmaking with conventional tropes, rarely seen outside Romania. It’s not just the fact that Florin Şerban was a student at the Columbia University that would give credit to such opinions; while he is surely fond of the American craft of delivering a story, he eventually underlines how important the experience induced by his film is for him. The main words he chooses to describe his film are “powerful” and “intense”, while compared with some of the movies of his competitors in Berlin. Reading his words and seeing the film, you cannot help to think of Fury, Radu Muntean’s film, a classic example of how cinema can be used as a medium for setting free your emotions, and I wonder how many viewers did empathize with the extremely violent ending, in which the main character ceaselessly hits an almost complete stranger, sick and tired of the way thing were going in Romania? If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle has the same anarchic feel, starting with the title; even if the screenwriter doesn’t keep its original meaning, taken from Andreea Vălean’s play, once you have seen the movie, you don’t need any further explanation: it’s the title of a typical anti-establishment film, requesting strong participation from the viewer.

In a progression of scenes, we witness how the main character, Silviu, who is only a few days away from being released from prison, is getting more and more powerless: while his prison mates are becoming hostile towards him, his requests are being ignored by the wardens. It’s obviously that any viewer would empathize with such a familiar situation, in which one tends to lose control. However, from a certain point, Silviu doesn’t stand his cowardliness and obedience anymore and decides to take charge of the situation, kidnapping a young and beautiful student, who he seems to be in love with. From that moment on, If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle becomes a genre film; nevertheless, while the viewer will expect probably a typical hostage movie situation and an appropriate ending, the genius of Florin Şerban is to keep the plot simple, with only a handful of characters, with a iterative image (Silviu holding a fragment of broken glass towards his hostage’s neck) and keeping the camera inside the room, betting on the chemistry between the two characters. It’s easily the best part of the film, kept simple and tense; we feel the tension, but we can also see it: after a while, there’s blood on Silviu’s hand holding the broken glass. Is it because he is beginning to be afraid and unconsciously clutches harder? While eventually the situation evolves into a regular escape, with Silviu leaving behind the implausibly stunned wardens, we can barely understand what does he want or where his actions will lead. By the time the film is about to end, the lack of dialogue turns If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle into The Graduate, with his noisy insurgence, followed by boredom and nothingness. Filmed in a raw, grim manner, barely having a soundtrack and inducing tension by the simplest of means, If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle is clearly the work of a director who’s perfecting his skills as a craftsman, but has already achieved a level of expressiveness that recommend him as a promising new figure in an area of the Romanian cinema that’s mostly (and regerettably) unknown.