CINEMA
Wanted: Gay-Acting Single Male
Imagining sexual ambiguity in a post-heterosexist world
BY GARY M. KRAMER
Out queer writer/
director James
Sweeney’s“Straight Up”
is a terrifi c rom-com with
a twist. Todd (Sweeney) drops a
bombshell on his two friends Ryder
(James Scully) and Meg (Dana
Drori) when he tells them, “I think
I’m not gay.” This nervous, hyperverbose,
OCD guy soon meets Rory
(Katie Findlay), a budding actress
who shares his hyper-verbosity,
his love of “The Gilmore Girls,” and
his desire not to have sex. (Among
Todd’s many issues are his anxieties
about bodily fl uids.) They
couple up in comfortable domesticity
— Todd’s job is house-sitting
in fabulous abodes — and fi gure
out how to manage a relationship
that almost everyone around them
questions.
➤ STRAIGHT UP, continued on p.25
The Canary’s Song
Constant surveillance, subterfuge pervade Romanian noir
BY STEVE ERICKSON
“The Whistlers” escapes
the grubbiness
of the Romanian
New Wave that
emerged in the 2000s. It takes a
classic fi lm noir scenario, in which
a corrupt cop gets involved with a
femme fatale, and spins around
old-fashioned fears about control
to express something contemporary
about surveillance. The title
refers to El Silbo Gomero, a form
of whistling that encodes Spanish
down to sounds representing two
vowels and four consonants. Director
Corneliu Porumboiu’s antihero
Cristi (Vlad Ivanov) learns it
on the Canary Islands and uses it
to conceal his true intentions in a
world where he’s constantly being
watched. His subterfuge is necessary
because he’s trying to free a
Katie Findlay and James Sweeney in Sweeney’s “Straight Up,” which opens February 28 at IFC Center.
gangster while under the heel of
prosecutor Magda (Radica Lazar),
who presses him to plant cocaine
on a man (which he refuses to do)
and poison another man (to which
he agrees).
The opening promises escape
from Eastern Europe — to the
tune of Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger,”
in case we didn’t get the message
— but it turns out to be a false
dawn: “The Whistlers” draws on
“Rear Window” to show the impossibility
of escape from surveillance
cameras. Cristi meets Gilda (Catrinel
Marlon) at his hotel, but the
entire space is being watched, even
when they have sex. The narrative
moves back and forth in time, piling
up contradictions. It’s divided
into chapters, each introduced by
an intertitle and dominated by a
different color scheme.
“The Whistlers” refers to the inherently
voyeuristic nature of cinema
as a visual medium. Last year,
David Robert Mitchell’s “Under the
Silver Lake” portrayed an amateur
detective running through LA
searching for clues to a conspiracy
theory that ultimately pointed nowhere
and showed his own glaring
fl aws. But some of the fans on the
fi lm’s subreddit became convinced
that a scene showing fi reworks
contained Morse code with a hidden
message to be deciphered and
sounded too much like the character
it was critiquing. “The Whistlers”
makes no pretense of describing
the conspiratorial mindset
or containing any secret messages,
but it gestures toward the ubiquity
of surveillance. It uses this as the
basis for a thriller, however, rather
than having much to say about it.
Whistling one’s true intentions in
order to state them without being
STRAND RELEASING
overheard by the wrong person
simply becomes a plot point.
Early Romanian New Wave fi lms
leaned toward pessimistic refl ections
on specifi c aspects of that
cou ntry’s life. “The Whistlers”
comes closest to Porumboiu’s second
fi lm “Police, Adjective,” not
least because Ivanov seems to play
the same character later in life.
But “Police, Adjective,” as one can
tell from its title, also brought up
similar questions of power and
language. “The Whistlers” has a
large enough budget to shoot in
glamorous, bright international
settings, with its fi nale taking
place in Singapore. While most of
it does take place in Romania, its
characters no longer seem trapped
by the country, as they did in the
fi lms he made there even well after
➤ THE WHISTLERS, continued on p.25
February 27 - March 11, 2 24 020 | GayCityNews.com
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