The Delinquents – first-look review | Little White Lies

Festivals

The Delin­quents – first-look review

18 May 2023

Words by David Jenkins

Two people sat in a grassy field, one wearing a white shirt and the other a blue shirt.
Two people sat in a grassy field, one wearing a white shirt and the other a blue shirt.
This dead­pan philo­soph­i­cal crime caper from Argenti­na’s Rodri­go Moreno is a mean­der­ing and hilar­i­ous delight from end to end.

News­flash: it turns out that the absolute worst bank in the world is sit­u­at­ed in Buenos Aires. Secu­ri­ty is so lax and the man­ag­er so chill that it would become very easy for rank-and-file staff mem­bers to devel­op notions of rip­ping off their slip­shod employer. 

And that’s exact­ly what the dis­con­so­late, seri­ous­ly-mind­ed Moran (Daniel Elías) choses to do, one day just stuff­ing a duf­fel bag with wads of notes and waltz­ing out of the front door. He’s fed up with his punch­clock exis­tence and has cal­cu­lat­ed that if he steals 600k pesos, that would be equiv­a­lent to his salary for 20 years. 

Tak­ing the hit of three-and-half years behind bars seems more than worth it (16-and-a-half years of free­dom!), and so he ropes in a hap­less accom­plice to look after the loot and man­age things from the out­side. Sad­ly, the mas­ter­plan turns to shit much more swift­ly than expect­ed, yet direc­tor Rodri­go Moreno takes us on a pitch-shift­ing odyssey where a dark Dos­toyevskyian tale of crush­ing guilt and moral turpi­tude trans­forms into some­thing hope­ful and strange­ly ebullient.

On the tail of coun­try­man Lau­ra Citarella’s sim­i­lar­ly cal­i­brat­ed dip­tych, Trenque Lauquen, it seems as if Argenti­na is hav­ing some­thing of a moment when it comes to free-form, sur­rep­ti­tious­ly mean­der­ing mega fea­tures that employ dura­tion as a way to chart pro­found human shifts over time. Indeed, The Delin­quents is sim­i­lar­ly nov­el­is­tic in its scope, with the inter­twin­ing for­tunes of Moran and his gawky bag­man Román (Este­ban Bigliar­di) sug­gest­ing that our des­tinies are unwrit­ten and, even at our low­est ebb, there’s still all to play for.

At one point in the film, Román takes his girl­friend on a date the cin­e­ma to see Robert Bresson’s L’Argent, which is a good exam­ple of the film’s mis­chie­vous sense of humour, but also some­thing of a red her­ring, as Moreno most cer­tain­ly doesn’t share the French maestro’s relent­less­ly dis­mal vision of mod­ern soci­ety as mere­ly pris­ons with­in pris­ons with­in prisons.

One thing to add is that this is a hilar­i­ous fun­ny film, yet the humour doesn’t ever come from jokes or con­trived set-ups. It’s more a sense of loom­ing real­i­sa­tion that the Moran and Román’s caper – explained and jus­ti­fied over a sin­gle pint in a pub – is even more flawed that we ever might have imagined.

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