IF I WANT TO WHISTLE, I WHISTLE (Eu când vreau să fluier, fluier) B
Romania Sweden Germany (94 mi)
2010 d: Florin Serban Official site [ro]
(After Ceauşescu),
Romania passed through some very difficult phases, (where the country) didn’t
have a natural elite that could lead us to a better model of society. It’s
difficult to pass from a communist to a capitalist model when the major part of
the society doesn’t understand what is happening. A large proportion of the
Romanian population is the elderly and what we tried to show in the movie is
this separation between parents and children. Due to economic hardship, many
Romanians are forced to go overseas and they leave their kids behind. This
creates a lot of problems, as the kids are raised by their grandparents. —Cătălin Mitulescu, co-writer and producer, also a fellow
director
We tend to forget that Romania is the country of Eugène
Ionescu, a modernist playwright and one of the foremost founders of the Theater
of the Absurd, where one of the tenets of the 20th century is finding no outlet
for personal expression, where behind the Iron Curtain Czesław Miłosz writes
about the enslavement of the consciousness in his book The Captive Mind, a reflection of the strain and mental anxiety on
the populace that accompanies the political repression of a totalitarian police
state, also reflected in the world of Kafka, who never finished any of his
full-length novels and burned 90 % of his writings, but had a habit of placing
his protagonists at the mercy of an unnamed oppressive system that repeatedly
forces the individual to capitulate to suffocatingly strange and bizarre acts,
where sanity manifests itself as insanity in an insane society. This mindset sets the tone for this film,
most all of which takes place inside a prison, a youth detention center where
non-professional actor George Pistereanu is Silviu, an 18-year old inmate who
has just two weeks left in serving his 4-year sentence before he is released. But rather than focus upon his freedom and his
potential liberation, his negative behavior if anything intensifies, as if the
tension of his upcoming release reveals itself in self-destructive
behavior. Marius Panduru, who has shot
several of the Romanian New Wave films such as 12:08 EAST OF BUCHAREST (2006),
POLICE, ADJECTIVE (2009), and the more recent Loverboy
(2011), also starring the two leads of this film, uses long takes and hand held
shots, accentuating the grim and colorless interior environment juxtaposed
against the outside grounds which catches the bright sunlight, where the prison
work detail actually works outdoors in relatively pastoral fruit orchards. The distinguishable mood between the two
worlds is pronounced, as inside inmates are subject to the continued presence
of armed guards, confined and claustrophobic spaces, and an inescapable lock
up, while on the outside grounds they’re free to play soccer or mingle casually
with one another, seemingly unmolested by the guards.
Despite the setting, this isn’t a prison movie, as the
authorities are fairly lenient, the guards have a good relationship with the
inmates, and the oppressive force is not the prison system itself, but the idea
of freedom. The only world Silviu
understands prohibits his freedom, keeping his frustrations and emotions in
check, where he isn’t just physically incarcerated, but intellectually and
emotionally powerless to effect his own future, where he has little to no
education, no work experience, and a future that seems decidedly bleak. Silviu has a younger brother that comes to
visit, notifying him that their mother has returned and wants to immediately take him with
her back to Italy where she works, something
Silviu is not comfortable with. When his
mother (Clara Voda) comes to visit, it sets the stage of family dysfunction,
where Silviu doesn’t want what happened to him happen to his brother, where his
mother dragged him around with her until she found a boyfriend and then sent
the kid away to fend for himself, a pattern of neglect that persisted
throughout his childhood to the point where Silviu pretty much grew up without
a mother, and personally raised his little brother himself. So her sudden arrival has ominous overtones,
where Silviu literally flips out at the thought that he’s powerless from inside
the prison walls to stop her, so can only make violent threats, as in his head,
he blows this up to gargantuan proportions, as he has no conception of the possibilities
that exist in the world outside. What
this film points to is in the past two decades, several million Romanian
workers have sought migratory work in Western Europe, mostly in Italy and
Spain, picking seasonal crops or working construction, leaving behind hundreds
of thousands of kids who grew up without their parents, a whole generation of disaffected
kids who do whatever they damn well please (thus the title) because there was
no one there to stop them.
Adapted by the director from an Andreea Valean play that was
developed in workshops with youth offenders, using actual inmates in the film
to enhance the authenticity of the atmosphere, this is largely an interior
psychological exposé, where instead of being hopeful about the future,
something the audience likely feels, as it’s what they would be looking forward
to, Silviu obsesses over his grim prospects unless he can keep his little
brother with him, the only person in the world apparently that he cares
about. With no musical score, the weight of the film falls on
Pistereanu’s shoulders, where the taunting from fellow inmates grows brutally
intense, knowing he can’t fight back or risk losing his release, his brooding
silences and violent eruptions reflect his unease and growing instability, yet
we sense the guy has good intentions, but simply no way to express them.
When prison counselors attempt to interview the inmates, what catches
their eyes is an attractive young woman Ana (Ada Condeescu), where Silviu is
obviously interested in more than just filling out a survey, intentionally
evading the answers, but she deftly moves on to another. In his mind,
however, she becomes the symbol of all the good things in life that he’ll never
have, which becomes a growing irritant in his head, looming large especially as
his sense of desperation with his family literally explodes into a rage of
unleashed violence, where he simply loses it, grabbing Ana as a hostage, where
the seriousness of the moment is undermined by the utter absurdity of his
thought process, where he starts relishing the attention of being a
fuck-up. Perhaps this is the only mentality he truly trusts and
understands, creating a wild diversionary situation so he can have one final
moment of control, perhaps one human being he can talk to, before he once again
loses his freedom, this time likely in an adult prison. As he comes to
terms with the utter hopelessness of his real future, life goes on as if
nothing has happened, as the world spinning round never even bats an eye.
