The last time I watched a Romanian movie it was about the endemic corruption in the country. The everyday life struggle to survive amidst the pressure of various authorities and small bureaucrats for their share. 5 here, 5 there, and your meagre monthly salary is gone paying for what you naturally deserve - like being released an official document or, the worse nightmare, for a normal medical service. Hence, the movies with a big success on the outside markets treating this topic. Personally I think it is about time - for 20 years already - to make movies about something else like love, heartbreak, death and love again. But actually, some of those movies threating about corruption are so good...
It happen to know more about Corneliu Porumboiu than he being a successful film director of international fame and I was always impressed by the personality of this young Romanian artist. La Gomera - The Whistlers - is Porumboiu´s fifth movie, produced the last year both in Romania and France. I watched the movie on MUBI part of my scribd monthly subscription.
Half-black comedy, half-drama, La Gomera is a mafia story: about policemen and other law&order authorities playing hard with those they are supposed to catch, for the price of thousand of dollars even millions. The policeman Cristi even travels to Canary Islands to learn a secret whistling system in order to organise a spectacular escape of a mafia person in Romania. There are no regrets and things are prepared in cold blood. The policeman comes relatively from a place of wealth, lives alone, relatively modestly, so why does he needs the money for? Hilariously, everyone is watching and being watched however the perversity of the system is so that everyone escapes because they know how to oil it.
Porumboiu turned this everyday drama into a tragi-comical movie, with various intertextual references to local and American movies. It´s a movie packed of action, absurd change of situations and an overall good play of the actors, although I may not be able to single out one or another of the actors. None plays bad, actually. The eclectic musical background deserves an extra mention as it amplifies the despair and put into perspective the ridiculous fate of the characters.
Hopefully, one day will come when there will be sucessful Romanian movies about love, heartbreak and love again. By the way, just found out they have parliamentary elections today, but at a first sight, I rarely see some hopes for a change.
Rating: 4 stars
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