Whistle review: the surprisingly hopeful world of competitive whistling

There’s a peculiar joy in vicariously dipping into the unique obsessions of others. So it is with Australian filmmaker Christopher Nelius’s delightful documentary Whistle at the Melbourne International Film Festival, which invites us into the kooky-cute company of hopefuls competing in Hollywood’s Masters of Musical Whistling.

With the refreshing air of Constantine Costi’s life-affirmingly quirky The Golden Spurtle, the documentary follows LA hopefuls and their international counterparts as they aim to perfect their trilling craft and claim the world championship.

It opens with the Disney princess-adjacent Molly, who was born in Australia but raised in LA. She shares the airily comic style of Lisa Kudrow’s The Comeback avatar, Valerie Cherish, except with none of that character’s occasionally cartoonish spikiness.

An internationally renowned whistling star who appears on the Barbie soundtrack, Molly’s no diva. She embraces whistling’s ability to lift us up or hold our hand in life’s down moments, with the gentlest hint that, like many of her fellow competitors, there’s a certain tendency towards an inadvertent solitary life with subtle shades of blue, not least Molly’s longing for mic reverb, outright banned by the competition rules.

Rising sun

Also fabulous is Japanese competitor Yuki. Happily married, his gorgeous toddler is transfixed by her dad’s astonishing whistling skills and multi-disciplinary ability with instruments. He’s particularly plucky on a ukulele.

While not as adorably abrasive as Spurtle’s intensely competitive Nick Barnard, Yuki is increasingly perplexed (or vexed) by his eternal second or third placing, noting that newcomers repeatedly overleap him. Watch out for his many dissociating gazes.

And yet the awesome Yuki is unstintingly supportive of aspiring newcomer Ayna Ziordia, who brings typically Spanish fire and her parents’ storytelling and circus prowess to her refusal to conform to the competition rules, playing fast and loose with the notes of Mozart’s Queen of the Night aria from The Magic Flute.  

That choice puts Ayna on a collision course with Lauren, a New Yorker who performs in joints including the fabulously queer Club Cumming. As sweet as almost everyone else here, she’s nevertheless flapping that Anya and others are stepping on her Night Queen toes. Not that this places them at loggerheads. Everyone wants the collective best for their close-knit community.

Watch the trailer

Matriarchal might

That includes the occasionally imperious, almost always about to crack it founder of the competition, Carole Anne Kaufman, a two-time crowned champion who made it her thing to cut through male dominance in the field.  

It’s through her multiple close calls with melting down over minute details that Whistle most closely resembles the outrageously funny mockumentary Best in Show, but for real.

Adoring all the competitors, she only wants the competition to be the best it can be, even if that occasionally means berating the band, wrangling peppy assistants, offering a stern shoulder for a volunteer battling his demons or venting her outright exasperation over a candy bar attendant (whose deadpan disinterest in pushing M&Ms makes her the film’s real MVP).

Carole clearly has her own heartaches, but she’s not the type of woman to let life’s punches roll her. She’s built an inclusive empire on matriarchal energy, and if she occasionally crackles and snaps, then so be it. It’s for the greater good, and there’s so much good at play in Whistle.

Sparking joy

It’s intriguing that Whistle shares the Melbourne International Film Festival stage with another rousing documentary about a whistler who went their own way, American filmmaker Rachael J Morrison’s dreamy Joybubbles.

It’s centred on the rebel-hearted, but similarly sublimely kind Josef Carl Engressia, whose later-in-life decision to legally change his name to the title of the doco tells you everything you need to know about his bubbly spirit.

This, despite his difficult beginning in a fracturing, itinerant family and terrible abuse at a boarding school run by vicious nuns.

A young Josef’s inability to put down sturdy roots was further complicated by society’s dismal failure to recognise the humanity of blind people at the time, resulting in him feeling so lonely and unloved that even the briefest hint of kindness from strangers stayed with him all his brilliant life.

Joybubbles found solace in telephones. At first, this was simply listening to the calm presence of the dial tone curled up in bed as his parents would fight. But soon he realised his gift for whistling had an unexpected bonus: he could match the tone and frequency of old-school switchboard connections and their increasingly digital evolution.

That meant Joybubbles could connect long-distance calls for free using his gift, a popular skill that put him on a collision course with the government and telephone companies – particularly as his newfound counterculture crew saw his daring grow, deliberately calling Moscow to raise the alarm and gain notoriety during the days of the reds under the bed scare.

ScreenHub: Highlights of the Melbourne International Film Festival

Joybubbles would regularly talk to telephone exchange employees and saw the career as a possible escape route to help him achieve his dream of living in a high-rise with a pool: a hope undimmed by a society that viewed him as unfit to mix company, let alone work.

As his confidence flourished, he also helped other lonely souls, creating fun mix tapes he’d leave on an answering machine for others to feel heard, adopting the neighbourly appeal of non-condescending kids’ entertainer Mr Rogers as his guiding light.

Morrison helps tell his story in a trippily visual way, sure, for those of us who are sighted. But you could easily close your eyes and let the loving embrace of Joybubbles’ soothing voice wash over you. His is a ripper of a story we could all learn something from.

Whistling memories

Why did these beautiful documentaries make me cry so much? There’s abundant joy in them, and that is moving in its own way. Yes, they both get at the damage done by isolation, of being made to feel unusual. I’ve no doubt you’ll adore Whistle and Joybubbles equally for these shared reasons.

But I realised halfway through Whistle that I kept thinking about my Papa Donnelly. My mum’s dad was a staunch, tough working-class man with a kind heart, despite the horrors he faced in the second world war and the scars he carried deeply. He had his struggles, but was unfailingly gentle with my brother and me. And oh boy, did we relish his melodic whistling.

That my treasured memories of him moved me so is a testament to both Nelius and Morrison’s beautiful storytelling and their focus on our collective joy at being one together.

Whistle and Joybubbles screen at Melbourne International Film Festival. Whistle will also have various regional screenings as part of the festival, and Joybubbles can be watched online.

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