The bank heist thriller is, even when executed mediocrely, generally one of the most reliably entertaining sub-genres that cinema has to offer, all perfectly-timed plans, deafening shootouts, and breathless tension when something goes wrong. Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents, however, has a different aim in mind. Starting with an inside job bank heist, it eschews conventional thrills in favour of something stranger and more dreamlike across a profoundly unhurried three hour runtime. The results are a mixture of profundity and patience testing, with a fascinatingly surreal tone throughout that keeps things from ever really getting boring, even as they get very, very slow.
Moreno opens the action in Buenos Aires as Moran (Daniel Elias), a boring man with a boring life, heads into his job at the bank, where he is entrusted as the treasurer, moving huge bundles of cash from the front desks to the safes at the back, all without any supervision. One day, almost on impulse, he decides to break this trust, stealing $650,000 in cash, shoving it into a gym bag, and heading home. From there, he ropes in co-worker Roman (Esteban Bigliardi), asking him to keep the money safe for three-and-a-half years as Moran confesses to the theft and serves his requisite jail time, splitting the money 50/50 between them once he gets out.
It’s not a plan that holds up to much scrutiny, but Moreno is not hugely interested in literalism or realism here. Though nothing extraordinary happens, The Delinquents is a fantastical film, a perhaps naïve look at what life *could* be if you weren’t chained to your dead-end job. The fact that Moran and Roman’s names are anagrams of one another – later, Roman will meet a friendly trio in the countryside called Ramon, Morna, and Norma (Margarita Molfino), the latter of which he falls in love with – is just one of Moreno’s explorations of how the same people can seem to live the same lives, or how one person can live many.
Even before the heist, an elderly woman at the bank is stopped from cashing a cheque because her signature is identical to another client’s, while Moran’s stay in prison sees him buying the protection of a seasoned inmate played by the same actor (German De Silva) as his hardass boss at the bank. It gives The Delinquents a woozy feeling that is very welcome, cutting through the sometimes difficult lack of incident elsewhere.
Though it is consistently intriguing, frequently beautiful, especially thanks to the various slow dissolve cuts employed in Moreno’s edit, and possessed of an energetic, old-school score, The Delinquents is not always all that compelling. The 189 minute runtime allows for a leisurely pace, which is welcome in some moments (like an extended picnic sequence out in some picturesque woodland), but less so in others (Roman’s relationship with his long-term girlfriend, for example, is profoundly uninteresting, and gets quite a lot of screentime). I did find my attention waning in the latter half and, though things perk up whenever we visit Moran in prison, which is initially terrifying but soon reveals its own freedoms, you do get the sense this is all a shaggy dog story.
Perhaps that’s partly the point, Moreno using some of this elaborate pointlessness to hammer home his point about the soul-destroying nature of work. The Delinquents’s central question, asked by Moran, is about whether 25 years of an office job is any less repressive to a person than 3 years of prison. It’s an interesting proposition, and one made with a great deal of style, but you can’t help but wish it came with just a bit more punch.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 