A bank worker asks a colleague to watch the cash he has stolen in this low-key Argentine feature from Rodrigo Moreno.
To Morán (Daniel Eliás), who works at a bank, the scheme makes good economic sense. Over beers, he explains his idea to a colleague, Román (Esteban Bigliardi). Morán, you see, has robbed money from their employer. He hasn’t taken an unreasonable amount — merely what the two would earn in 25 more years of working there. Morán intends to turn himself in and go to prison for much less than that: With good behavior, he calculates he will spend three and a half years behind bars. In the interim, Román can watch the bag of cash, which they will split. If Román refuses to cooperate, Morán could easily frame him as an accomplice anyway.
This encounter occurs just shy of half an hour into the three-hour Argentine film “The Delinquents,” written and directed by Rodrigo Moreno. Morán is not the first person to elect this particular illegal financial plan, at least in cinema. Moreno has pointed to “Hardly a Criminal,” a 1949 film by the great Argentine-born director Hugo Fregonese, as an influence. The most lurid version of the scenario might be in Nagisa Oshima’s “Pleasures of the Flesh” (1965), in which the man minding the loot decides to spend a year lavishing it on female companionship, then kill himself.
Nothing that exciting happens in “The Delinquents,” and in a sense, the film is an elaborate joke on viewers who go in anticipating high stakes. Like Morán, “The Delinquents” wants to live modestly. It’s less concerned with satisfying the expectations of its genre than in finding waggish ways to deviate from them. To the film’s thinking, narrative is only a construct. “The Delinquents” makes a game out of seeing how much doubling and wordplay it can get away with without being accused of preciousness. Clever wipes show the protagonists’ lives in parallel. Structure is unstable; a belated flashback reveals the pair to be connected in an unexpected way.
Right at the beginning, two of the bank’s clients are found to have the same signature. Morán and Román’s names are anagrams, something that is obvious before Moreno introduces the characters Morna, Norma and Ramón. In prison, Morán meets a gang boss who is the same as his bank boss, in the sense that both are played by the same actor, Germán De Silva. (That doing time is tougher than toiling in a bank is not a notion Morán appears to have factored into his cost-benefit analysis.)
“The Delinquents,” which Moreno shot from 2018 to 2022, is itself divided into two parts. The low-grade suspense of the first section gives way to a deliberately rambling back half, and, en route to its non-denouement, the movie muses over picnicking, horseback riding and other joys that money can’t buy. As in “Psycho,” a comparison the ruptured plot faintly evokes without earning, the robbery isn’t what matters here.
The film is not without its charms or a sense of humor. The scene in which Morán gets himself arrested, catching even the police off guard, is a comic highlight, as is the business involving Laura (Laura Paredes, of “Trenque Lauquen”), a determined accountant assigned to investigate the robbery for an insurance company. Her efforts to torment Román might have made for a great workplace comedy in their own right, but “The Delinquents” spends three hours scolding its audience for being greedy.
The Delinquents
Not rated. In Spanish with subtitles. Running time: 3 hours, 9 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
