The Delinquents Review: Rodrigo Moreno’s Wily and Wry Existential Puzzler

The best capers are endowed with a professional gambler’s spirit of self-assured play, and this inherent mischievousness is both taken to logical extremes and given a less flashy treatment in Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents. The film constantly toys with its audience, deploying genre cues only to sidestep their expected payoffs and moral resolutions. Whether one interprets the routes that it takes as relatively frivolous fun or serious arthouse theme-making hardly affects the pleasure of watching it. That distinction is just one of many that are defied in a film that treats the very notion of identity like an easily foiled con man.

The Delinquents alternatingly dares the viewer to read it as a caper flick, a moral parable, a comedy of coincidences, and an existential probe. It probably lands closest to the latter, though in fine existential fashion, it also cautions against searching for too much weighty significance in its story. Throughout, the confrontation with the meaninglessness of it all is presented with a spirit of levity, and those characters doing the confronting are more haps than heroes.

Moreno’s three-hour film opens with a depiction of discrete but concise details pertaining to the banal morning routine of Morán (Daniel Elías), a middle manager at a bank in Buenos Aires who, possibly on a whim, takes advantage of propitious interruptions in that routine to pocket over $600,000 from the bank’s vault. Almost as if he’s seen the same heist movies that we have, this nondescript bank manager suddenly has a detailed plan of action. He coolly ropes one of the clerks, Román (Esteban Bigliardi), into stashing the cash while Morán serves an expected three-and-a-half-year prison sentence after traveling northwest to Córdoba and turning himself in.

As Román sweats under the pressure of the mounting internal investigation, Morán finds himself targeted by the prison boss, Garrincha, who’s cut from the same stripe as his former boss at the bank. Figuratively but also literally, because the prison’s heavy is played by Germán de Silva, the same actor who plays the supervisor at the bank, Del Toro.

Doubling abounds in The Delinquents. One of the administrative hiccups that allows Morán to seize the money is the confusion that spreads when an elderly female client turns out to have a signature identical to a male account-holder with a totally different name. What’s in a name, the film repeatedly asks as it continues to coyly name new characters by simply rearranging the same five letters. In a forest in Córdoba where he’s gone, on Morán’s instructions, to hide the duffel bag of money, Román meets a documentary filmmaker, Ramón (Javier Soro), along with his collaborators, Morna (Cecilia Rainero) and Norma (Margariita Molfino).

The word games and doppelgngers that dot Moreno’s screenplay give the film some of its elusive, almost cosmic sense of mystery. The Delinquents is a labyrinth whose dead ends are more rewarding than any clearly illuminated exit. An expected culmination of tension in the prison is essentially replaced by a reading of Ricard Zelarayán’s poem “The Great Salt Flats.” Beautiful, languorous lap dissolves put a wrinkle in the conventional forward drive of narrative and image the divergences and convergences of Morán and Román’s paths, approaching dreamlike, Lynchian representations of mystically exchanged identities.

Throughout, we wait for one of those paths to lead us to the expected conclusion: that Román’s anguish over the illicit satchel of money in his possession will result in a moral reckoning, a la A Simple Plan, and that Morán’s suffering in prison will lead to a Shawshank-like redemption. But such expectations are repeatedly upended by casual happenstance. The plot takes sharp lefts with such little fanfare that it takes seconds to process when the film slips from something like a thriller to something approximating an impressionist idyll, as Román lounges among the trees with Norma, Morna, and Ramón, eating grapes and playing, what else, name games.

That kind of freedom does appear to be what Morán and Román are looking for in staging their no-frills rebellion against their employer, who would just as soon bury the crime if it means not panicking the bank’s clients. The pair’s idea is that their prison stints—in Román’s case, being under the constant scrutiny of the bank’s in-house investigators—are preferable to the 20 years of menial labor that it would take them to earn the same amount of money that Morán stole, but it’s also unclear what the proper escape route from this life would actually be. “Wine and bread make the path,” Ramón proverbializes to Román as they picnic, and through his affair with Norma, Román appears to access the fantasy of simple, anti-urban, un-alienated life.

But it’s also unclear whether that life of corporeal pleasure is what Román really wants, or if it’s just a fantasy he’s been roped into by Morán. While Elías channels something of the quiet but inwardly resentful “beta” as Morán, who gets rather pushy when the comparatively meek Román expresses doubts, Bigliardi’s plays Ramón as more or less a blank slate, pushed around by circumstances and defined more by his anxieties than his desires. Clearly the man would not like to get caught, but more than anything Román is defined by his passive, mute stare.

But it’s not that, by contrast, Morán’s machinations lead to the places either he or the viewer might expect. As signaled by De Silva’s dual role as bank and prison boss, the gestures that the characters in The Delinquents take toward liberation from convention land them in simply a different realm of convention. In the end, Moreno suggests with wry but warm humor that any sort of escape from the drudgery of one’s everyday life won’t come from any concrete plan.