The worst criminals in the world find deeper meaning in their lives in this hilarious odyssey from Rodrigo Moreno.
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 be very easy for rank-and-file staff members to cultivate obscene notions of ripping off their slipshod employer. And that’s exactly what the disconsolate, seriously-minded Moran (Daniel Elías) choses to do.
One day he decides to stuff a duffel bag with wads of notes and just waltzes out of the front door. He’s absolutely 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, Esteban Bigliardi’s Román, to look after the loot and manage things from the outside. Once he’s free and the bank/authorities have given up their investigations to retrieve the missing cash, the spoils will be shared and it’s happiness from here on in. Sadly (and hilariously) Moran’s masterplan goes to pot much more swiftly than expected, yet director Rodrigo Moreno takes us on a pitch- shifting and poetic odyssey where a dark Dostoyevskyian tale of crushing guilt and moral turpitude transforms into something hopeful and strangely ebullient. Rather than use his film to chide his characters for their knuckle-headed wrongdoing, the director opts to look at the strange ways that both men are able to claw themselves back from their own private oblivions.
The Delinquents arrives on the tail of countryman Laura Citarella’s similarly calibrated diptych, Trenque Lauquen, and it seems as if Argentina is having something of a moment when it comes to free-form, surreptitiously meandering mega features (this one runs to three hours) that employ duration as a way to chart profound human shifts over time. Indeed, this film is similarly novelistic in its scope, with the intertwining fortunes of Moran and his gawky bagman suggesting that our destinies are unwritten and, even at our lowest ebb, there is still all to play for.
At one point in the film, Román takes his girlfriend on a date to the cinema to catch 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. Moreno most certainly doesn’t share the French maestro’s relentlessly dismal vision of modern society as prisons within prisons within prisons; instead he talks about how absolution that can be found in the strangest of places.
One thing to emphasise is that this is a very funny film, yet the humour doesn’t ever come from jokes or contrived set-ups. It’s more a sense of looming realisation that this caper – explained and justified over a single pint in a pub – is even more flawed that we ever might have imagined.
Little White Lies is committed to championing great movies and the talented people who make them.
Published 22 Mar 2024
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