Friday 18 May 2012

"If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle" (The Guardian 18/05/12)


If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle (15) ***

This punchy, economical Romanian drama establishes a strong sense of place (a young offenders’ institute in the countryside) before gradually coming to describe the trouble its protagonist – Silviu (George Pistereanu), a hothead with two weeks remaining on his sentence – finds himself in. The close-knit, Dardennes-like approach, hewing squarely to Silviu’s shoulders, catches the boy’s growing isolation from both his fellow inmates and the world beyond the gates; it also prompts a simmering performance from Pistereanu, forced to prove himself amid an ensemble of actual young offenders whose roughhousing looks and sounds very much the real thing. The stand-off that results, as Silviu finally decides to grab what he wants in life, proves as despairing as it is tense: not for the first time, a Romanian film shows us an individual floundering within a system from which there can be no easy escape.

If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle opens in selected cinemas from today.

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