Whether it’s the flat white lighting and washed-out color grading that gives The Delinquents the look of a ‘70s TV serial, or the fact that much of it is set in a mountain swimming beach where people claim to see apparitions, there is an undercurrent of genuine oddity running beneath this long, complex film. Screening at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard section for innovative or personal cinema, Rodrigo Moreno’s story begins with a bank robbery. The very ease with which this crime is committed is odd in itself: Moran (Daniel Elias) simply walks into the bank vault, puts a pile of American dollars in his gym bag and goes home. Not what you expect in a heist film, but here is the point. Over the next three hours, Moreno will deconstruct the genre with the calm focus of a safecracker taking apart a lock.
Moran works in a large bank in Cordoba, Argentina. It’s a dreary office where everyone seems to be very conscientious. He doesn’t have to crack anything; he just has to pick his moment, when one colleague has gone to a doctor’s appointment and another taking an early day. He counts the money as he takes it. He doesn’t want it all; he has calculated how much he would earn in the next 20 years and is taking exactly that much for himself and the same amount for Roman (Esteban Bigliardi), the colleague he hopes will become an accomplice. The security camera catches him in the act. That is part of the plan. In a day or two, he will confess to the crime, having given the money to Roman to stash in his chosen hiding spot. Based on his researches into sentencing, he reckons on serving a bit over three years. After that, life will start afresh.
Roman is stunned when Moran approaches him. Their intimacy extends no further than an occasional beer after work. Yet somehow, he slips into his wake, taking the gym bag, hiding it in the wardrobe and trying to look neutral when the bank’s managers begin their investigation. The middle hour of the film is concerned with his trip into the remote, rocky mountainside beside a river, where Moran has told him to secrete the money. “It’s nice there; you’ll like it,” says Moran, as if recommending a spot for a future picnic.
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He does, in fact, meet some picnickers: a man and two women who tell him, over the lunch, they have urged him to share, that they are making a film about gardens. This seems to be an endless, formless project that does no more than give a shape to their days; there are no gardens out on the pampas, but they have decided that small wildflowers are just as interesting. They are lotus-eaters, basking in modest pleasures, thinking nothing of spending a working day by the river drinking wine and playing word games. Roman, whose adult life has been spent at a teller’s desk, is enjoyably dazed by their sybaritic. When the beautiful Norma (Margarita Molfino) urges him to stay, he succumbs to the moment, his partner at home forgotten and the dreadful burden of criminality left behind on the hillside.
The conventions of genre would suggest that Norma should be a double-dealing thief herself or that Roman should discover he has been framed in a complicated long con involving everyone else. There should be a gun pulled or a police chase. Occasionally, the narrative will swerve gently toward these kinds of decisive moments but then get back on meandering track. There is a surprise in store, but it is a personal story from the past that sheds light on why Moran chose this impractical hiding spot.
Moran serves his time in prison, where he suddenly discovers a love of modern poetry. Even prison boss Garrincha – played by the same actor who plays the bank’s irascible manager, German de Silva, in one of Moreno’s many sly formal challenges to the way we read the film – is persuaded as Moran reads aloud in the exercise yard. Meanwhile, back at the bank, an investigator from the central office is convinced Roman has something to do with the theft. Will they find him out? Of course not. That would certainly propel the narrative into the conventional place of jeopardy, but Moreno is working to a very different purpose.
As are the thieves, neither of whom ultimately is interested in money. They don’t want to buy boats or live large in the fleshpots of Rio. They are just unfulfilled, somewhat dull men in early middle age who want to buy new lives. Which they do – though, again, not in the way you might expect. Rodrigo Moreno is a slippery customer. The Delinquents presents a box-office challenge — a three-hour film that refuses to deliver any of the usual genre payoffs — but the director should be high on anyone’s list of ones to watch.
Title: The Delinquents
Festival: Cannes (Un Certain Regard)
Director-screenwriter: Rodrigo Moreno
Cast: Daniel Elias, Esteban Bigliardi, Margarita Molfino, German De Silva, Laura Paredes, Mariana Chaud, Cecilia Rainero, Javier Zoro Sutton, Gabriela Saidón
Running time: 3 hr
Sales agent: Magnolia Pictures International