A Heist Movie Like No Other

In The Delinquents, two men rob a bank not to get rich but to free themselves of the demands of modern life. Photo: MUBI

For a brief moment early on in Argentine director Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents, a tense, jazzy tune plays on the soundtrack as Morán (Daniel Elias) goes about methodically robbing the bank where he works, taking wads of cash out of the vault and putting them in his backpack while nobody else is around. It’s a playful glimpse of the type of film Moreno could have made, a little tease that itself serves as part of the director’s oddball vision. The Delinquents is being billed as a heist movie, which is not technically incorrect; it is, in fact, a film about a man who robs a bank and then coaxes a co-worker into an elaborate scheme to get away with it. But at heart, The Delinquents is about leaving an oppressive world behind and discovering the possibility of freedom in a new one. The heist itself belongs to the old world — alongside the cold spaces of the bank, the bustle of Buenos Aires, and the anxieties of modern life. The film sheds its genre trappings in its pursuit of languorous new rhythms.

The thieves here are not looking to get rich. “Three and a half years in jail, or 25 at the bank?� is how Morán puts it to his colleague Román (Esteban Bigliardi), explaining why he’s resorted to crime. (Many of the characters’ names are anagrams of each other — there’s also a Ramon, a Norma, and so on — which adds to the fanciful, dreamlike nature of the picture.) Morán’s devious plan is quite simple: He’ll confess to the robbery and get three years in prison. Román, who wasn’t even in the bank on the day of the robbery due to a doctor’s appointment, will hide the money in the meantime. Afterward, the two men will have just enough to not have to work for a living. The goal is not wealth; it’s liberty.

But is such a goal, such a world, even possible? Moreno’s film is really about the wait in between, about what happens as these two men bide their time. Morán finds himself enduring the worst prison has to give him, and Román becomes gradually seduced by the idea of an existence without boundaries and responsibilities, a life lived away from the city and its grown-up demands. Led to the mountains by Morán’s instructions, Román drifts into a connection with a beautiful young woman (Margarita Molfino), who lives a modest, happy life off the land. When he tries to bring her back to the city, however, Román discovers just how bound he is to that old reality.

Clocking in at 183 minutes, The Delinquents is a movie of detours both narrative and formal. In contrast to the city, Moreno films the sequences in the mountains with documentary matter-of-factness — and yet there’s something unreal, almost magical about them, like a fable that Román has wandered into. That’s perhaps because we ourselves belong to the rat race; this country idyll might bring Román closer to the earth and to life, but to us it feels like another planet.

This is the mystery at the heart of The Delinquents: The textures of a world which we might have known once, but to us now feels so distant, so strange and other. We might notice that the characters stand a bit more upright in this world, that they seem more confident and rejuvenated. Morán seems like such a downcast schlub at the office, where he’s basically an anonymous and confined pencil-pusher. (To emphasize the sense of entrapment, Moreno films the character’s scenes at the bank through the protective bars guarding the vault, as though it were an actual prison.) Later, as he himself wanders in nature, Morán gains an unlikely charisma, as if communing with a lost part of his being.

Although it seems unimpeded and unhurried by the demands of conflict and resolution, The Delinquents is never boring or tedious. This is partly due to Moreno’s light, humorous touch when it comes to storytelling. An investigation at the bank into the theft eventually takes on absurd dimensions — not for metaphorical reasons but just because Morán’s crime is itself so ridiculous. But the film also works because its structure is so loose. Eventually, we lose any sense of where we are in the ostensible story; we’re not biding our time until something happens. The Delinquents works its magic on us the way that the promise of freedom works on its characters. It’s a vision of a life unlived — as impossible as it is intoxicating.