Whistle
(Australia, 84 min.)
Dir. Christopher Nelius
Programme: TIFF Docs (World premiere)
“You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and…blow,” Slim (Lauren Bacall) tells Harry (Humphrey Bogart) in Howard Hawks’ 1944 classic To Have and Have Not. Slim’s seductive line, one of Production Code-era Hollywood’s best, offers a saucy bark in a film with plenty of bite. But Slim’s instructions for whistling make the sound seem easy to create. There’s an art to a good whistle as the stars of this offbeat film prove with memorable colour and musicality.
Director Christopher Nelius (Storm Surfers 3D) hits the best notes of the competition doc field with this joyously peculiar tale. Whistle whisks audiences to the inaugural Masters of Musical Whistling competition in Hollywood where founder Carole Anne Kaufman hopes to unite a global community of blowhards and give the art form its due. Nelius finds himself firmly in Christopher Gust territory with characters who are almost too colourful to believe. The wind they blow is awfully mighty.
Kaufman herself is a gigantic personality emboldened by the joy of seeing her labour of love come to fruition. But she’s also hitting overdrive when it comes to micro-managing to see the dream fulfilled. She worries that the candy at the snack counter is under-priced, while the poor woman tasked with selling the concessions thinks it’s too much to ask folks to pay two bucks for M&Ms that cost a dollar. Whistle drolly cuts back to the concession counter, bereft of patrons but bountiful with chocolate, whenever it can. The employee’s bored, slightly sour look easily ranks among the film’s best observations of the idiosyncrasies within this event. Another storyline with a volunteer struggling with addiction (and seemingly lurking in the background of every shot) illustrates how Kaufman juggles numerous roles including mother and guidance counsellor. For all her draining type-A behaviour, she really cares about everyone involved in mounting the competition.
While Kaufman generally serves as the main set of eyes through which audiences see the competition, Whistle focuses on a handful of musicians vying for top prize. (In one of the competition’s many quirks, first prize goes not to the overall winner, but the runner-up, while second place goes to the whistler deemed third best, and so on.) Whistlers include professionals like American Molly Lewis. She shares how a famous duet (and kiss) with a parrot skyrocketed her to relative fame. She now lends her instrument to albums and movie soundtracks, including the mega-hit Barbie. But the pressure’s on even if people find her star status intimidating. She’s far more comfortable as a recording artist than as a competitor, and Whistle shows there’s as much of an art to mastering elements of a challenge as there is to perfecting the craft being evaluated.
This nature of the competition finds a terrific storyline when competitor Lauren Elder learns that she’s one of five whistlers set to perform “Queen of the Night” from the opera The Magic Flute in the strand of the competition that requires participants to whistle a classic tune. She commits herself to whistling the song as written, but hones in on operatic levels of performance to help her rendition eclipse the competition. Meanwhile, Spanish whistler and audience favourite Ayna Ziordia Botella discloses that she’s tweaking the number because she thinks there’s room for improvement. Other whistlers like Japan’s Yuki Takeda have the technique down pat, but can’t match Ayna’s stage presence. Yuki shares his recurring frustration with continually finishing in second (re: third) place and knows that there’s no deviating from the judging rubric if he wants to be best in show.
Whistle delivers a textbook competition doc with its hugely entertaining observation of what it means to commit oneself to one’s passion. The character-driven film leaves one completely bemused and enlightened. The passionate competitors illustrate how the whistle ranks among the most unsung instruments in music. It’s not merely a noise for training dog and sending sexist catcalls. They share how it takes technical mastery, respect for tradition, and a memorable stage presence to captivate an audience. Anyone who can’t master all three is just whistling Dixie. But this consistently delightful film shows how finding the right tune keeps each whistler grounded.
Whistle screens at TIFF 2025.
Get more coverage from this year’s festival here.
