Try to imagine the least film-noir scene possible and you might come up with a group of five-year-olds learning to whistle. It is late morning, pre-lockdown, in a classroom at Nereida Díaz Abreu school on La Gomera in the Canary Islands, and the teacher – a bent knuckle crammed in his mouth – is relaying instructions in a piercing, swooping, set of whistles. The kids look quizzically skywards, then collapse in hysterics, although most eventually nail it.
“Touch your left ear with your right hand,” the teacher reiterates in Spanish.
“Ay-ay-ay!” the children hoot in disbelief.
They are learning the el silbo gomero, the island’s whistling language, which dates back at least to the 15th century and is now the unlikely star of a new Romanian film noir, The Whistlers. A bent Bucharest cop Cristi (Vlad Ivanov) is summoned to the distant island by a local drug gang to learn their secret language, so he can help them retrieve €30m stolen by their eastern European middleman. It is a rich, roundabout handbook on the subtleties of communication; even the film’s structure, a series of flashbacks in which you are perpetually looking for who is double-crossing whom, seems to collude in this.
With its deep-cut volcanic ravines, shaggy Tolkienian laurel forest and Tenerife’s volcano floating above the cloudline, La Gomera hits the visual jackpot. But the film’s director, Corneliu Porumboiu, insists it was the island’s aural dimension that attracted him. He came across el silbo 10 years ago on a French TV documentary; the Canaries’ Spanish colonists inherited the language from La Gomera’s Guanche inhabitants, who used it to communicate across the steep valleys. “It was this strange kind of bird language that seemed to come from ancient times. So for me using this in a super-technological society created a certain type of tension and poetry – and was funny as well,” Porumboiu says.
Contrary to film noir’s most famous whistling tip, from Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not – “You just put your lips together and blow” – el silbo takes some mastering. The film’s silbo consultant, Kico Correa, insisted the lead actors had to learn for real. “It’s been classified as Unesco World Heritage, so it needs to be treated with special respect,” he explains to me at a harbourside cafe. “You can dub the sound, but the lip movements needed to be credible.”
Ivanov and Catrinel Marlon, who plays the film’s moll, Gilda, were both put on to a two-week silbo crash course in Bucharest, followed up later with Skype sessions. It was not simply a case of training in the physical mechanics, but also how to understand its system of letter substitution. It strips down an underlying language – Spanish, in La Gomera’s case – to just two vowels and four consonants. The same approximate whistling pitch, for example, is used for “A”, “O” and “U”. Rephrasings, clarifying questions and awareness of the context at hand are sometimes needed to avoid misunderstandings.
Even though the actors’ whistling was eventually dubbed by the island’s silbo teachers, Correa gives them A for effort. Marlon, who started slightly later than Ivanov, had more natural aptitude, he says. A fashion model, she whistled so hard during practice that she had to pull out of a photoshoot in Italy because her lips were too chafed.
Porumboiu lasted just a single day on the course because he was busy preparing the film. The Whistlers is a clear break from the garrulous, sly and sometimes wilfully pedantic arthouse he produced when he graduated as a leading light of the 00s Romanian new wave. But the film’s use of el silbo is perfectly in line with the director’s longstanding interest in communication; how the relationship between language and meaning is rarely straightforward.
It is there in his debut 12:08 East of Bucharest, with its radio show guests bickering about how the exact moment the news of Ceauşescu’s deposal was relayed to their backwater town is crucial to deciding whether it can be said an actual revolution took place there. Or the police captain played by Ivanov in Police, Adjective, who turns to the dictionary for the definition of his profession to solve a crisis of conscience. Or the bureaucrat in Porumboiu’s last film, Infinite Football, whose tinkering with the rules of the sport doesn’t pan out in reality. The director wrings out a colourful stream of comic possibility from misinterpretation in these films, but language, via el silbo, plays a darker, concealing role in The Whistlers, a world in which people can rarely express themselves truthfully.
The director, speaking on the phone under lockdown in the Romanian countryside, is at a loss to explain his interest in the theme. “To be honest, I’m not doing it on purpose. It’s a personal matter, this feeling that we don’t understand each other.” Where does it come from? “I think it’s coming from … my inability … ” He tails off.
Back in March on La Gomera, I am having my own communication issues. Five minutes of efforts better described as spitting than whistling are enough to leave my deoxygenated head spinning. But Correa – a short, calm Gomero who resembles Robert Forster – has had to learn patience in his day job organising the island’s silbo syllabus. The language had virtually died out in the 1970s, associated with a peasant lifestyle many people were keen to leave behind. Correa’s parents were among a minority who didn’t view it as backward. “My family thought differently: we’re going to make our children learn it, so they can be in advance,” he says in French, the only language both of us understand.
El silbo’s moment came in the late 90s, when an upsurge in interest resulted in a push to make it compulsory on the school curriculum. Now learning it for half an hour each week is obligatory for six-year-olds and upwards; three- to five-year-olds also receive tuition, mostly in comprehension. “We don’t make a big effort to say: ‘You should learn it to support your culture,’” says Correa. “It’s too much weight for kids. We encourage them to do it for fun. We say: ‘When you go to Tenerife and say you’re from La Gomera, people are going to ask you if you can whistle.’”
I also sit in on an impressively adept classroom of teenagers, chattering away in silbo like manic songbirds. But how much do they use it in everyday life? Marta, a regular victor in the class’s silbo competitions, says: “Sometimes. For fun. But mobile phones are easier.” Gabriel, rosy-cheeked with an unexpected Mancunian accent (his family came to live on La Gomera nine years ago), sheepishly admits he doesn’t practise enough. He can understand the language, but his whistling is below par: “We only have lessons once a week, but I can’t really do it.”
The education programme is vital for preserving this rare offshoot of the world linguistic tree. But from the silence reigning over La Gomera’s stepped basalt cliffs, where there are few shepherds now, it is clear that it’s not quite a living language, either; it’s mostly heard in classrooms or in restaurants, in demonstrations for tourists.
While The Whistlers is unlikely to make the island’s hills suddenly alive with the sound of unusually articulate birds, it should help magnify el silbo’s worldwide cultural status. Correa appears briefly in the film as a Gomero gangster, but was originally slated for a bigger part as the teacher; as Porumboiu learned more about the language and the role expanded, it called for a professional actor. Correa, though, is not disappointed. The sound of his ear-splitting whistles ringing out between Bucharest apartment blocks on screen testify to him having fully communicated his passion: “My character in the film is el silbo. It’s me.”
The Whistlers and Infinite Football will stream from 8 May in the UK and Ireland on Curzon Home Cinema
