The Whistlers, Whistling The Liberty

festival de cannes 2019 plus belles annees vie

Claude Lelouch & actors of Les Plus Belles Années de la Vie ©YesICannes.com

The Competition on the Croisette welcomed Diao Yinan’s Wild Goose Lake (China) and Cornelio Porumboiu’s The Whistliers (Romania) on the 17th of May while Claude Lelouch returned with Les Plus Belles Années d’Une Vie (The Most Beautiful Years of A Life).

The team of Wild Goose Lake ©YesICannes.com

Yinan Diao‘s Wild Goose Lake is inspired by a real event in China. The film is featuring a gang leader in search of redemption and a prostitute who is ready to do anything to regain his freedom. Both who find themselves in the middle of a manhunt. Together, they decide to play one last time with their fate. Yinan Diao won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale in 2014 with his superb black film Black Coal, which was then a great commercial success.

Anouk Aimée & Jean-LouisTrintignant ©DR

The Most Beautiful Years of A Life: que reste-t-il de leurs amours?

Director Claude Lelouch (81) has presented out of competition at the Festival Les Plus Belles Années d’Une Vie (The Most Beautiful Years of A Life), the story continues 53 years after A Man and A Woman, the mythical film that earned him the Palme d’Or. A man and a woman, who have known each other for a long time, whose unexpected love story, caught in a parenthesis that has become mythical, has revolutionized our way of seeing love. With actors Anouk Aimée and Jean-LouisTrintignant.

The Whistlers ©DR

The Whistlers, mafia and double game

Cristi (Vlad Ivanov) is a disillusioned cop from Bucharest who no longer believes in his vocation or his personal life. Corrupted by drug traffickers, he is suspected by a female prosecutor and put under video surveillance. Cristi arrives on a wild Canary Island, La Gomera, where Gilda (Catrinel Marlon) will teach him El Silbo, the ancestral whistling language, unique in the world, practiced on the island. El Silbo allows you to code the spoken language. Cristi is forced to learn it to thwart wiretapping to organize an escape for Zsolt (Sabin Tambrea) who knows where the laundered 30 million euros, claimed by a mafia of drug traffickers, are hidden.

©DR

Powerful characters and rythm

In La Gomora (The Whistlers), Cornelieu Porumboiu composes a dark and complex reality, filmed in natural light, with many close-ups, where several realities are superimposed that you flicker in chapters named after the names of the powerful characters who mark this thriller-opera where music – rock, arias, or musicals – plays its personal role. Actionpacked, with plenty of percussive dialogues, the scenario keeps you enthralled, with nothing gratuitous or superfluous. The motivation of the film is that a very old form of communication enables to escape the controls of a hyper-technological society. And this, until the end, where El Silbo becomes tool of freedom.

©DR

The bad cop and the femme fatale

The women are the influencial characters who provoke the events: Gilda, the prosecutor Magda, Christi’s mother, who by her strict moral principles causes her son’s disgrace. Gilda, the femme fatale, an ambiguous character, the driving force behind the film noir, both bait and predator, manipulates others by her power and submission. It is the charm of a thrilling film, with an end contrary to the dictates of the genre (the wicked punished, the good glorified and God sanctified), where the heroes find a form of purifying innocence in love.

Cornelieu Porumboiu came to La Croisette in 2015 with Le Trésor, selected at Un Certain Regard.