RODRIGO MORENO: THE DELINQUENTS/LOS DELINCUENTES (2023) - THE NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL


SCENE FROM THE DELINQUENTS: ESTABAN BIGLIARDI, FAR RIGHT

The disappointments

TRAILER

Premise (IMDb): "Morán and Román are looking for freedom and adventure. One commits a robbery, discovering an alternative to his boring life, while the other hides money that doesn't belong to him. Their destiny as new criminals will bring them together." Cannes: Un Certain Regard. Peter Bradshaw called this a "beguilingly surreal slow-motion Buenos Aires heist tale" and said that "If Pedro Almodóvar and Eric Rohmer teamed up to compose a meanderingly long crime caper it might look like this." He gave it five stars in the Guardiah.

Jessica Kiang calls The Delinquents "banally surreal." It is that, but perhaps with more of the emphasis on the banal (and none on the beguiling), though the plot line includes coincidences and doublings that are more like a fable or fairy tale than any kind of modern film. It's buffoonery mixed with adventure and romance, certainly a promising combination in its way. The trouble is that it meanders too much. It seemed to me ultimately not to live up to expectations, and I wondered if the estimable, expert critics like Jessica Kiang, Peter Bradshaw, Jordan Mintzer and David Erlich saw the same film I did, or I was just having a bad day.

The opening has been congratulated for being an original bank robbery because it's such a low-keyed, slow-film one. (Crime, even successful crime, is certainly often duller or less suspenseful in real life than it is in movies.) The robber is a bank employee, Morán (Daniel Elías), and even a bit of a schlub. He looks like John C. Reilly. His robbery seems to consist just of shifting a lot of money back and forth between bags and metal boxes and opening and shutting vaults. When it's done, he goes home somehow with around $650,000. We know he has put one over on his employers, even if we may not really know how. It's banker stuff, gaming the system.

The scene that follows is the movie's best. Morán meets with his coworker, the leaner and more athletic (but still ordinary-looking) Román (Esteban Bigliardi) at a busy, popular Buenos Aires pizza house, where they eat and drink beer standing up surrounded by other people. The parallelism of the names, Morán-Román, underline perhaps a little too broadly that the screenplay is tongue-in-cheek. And it isn't all tongue-in-cheek by any means. Anyway, it's in this crowded room that Morán tells Román he has stollen $650,000, in dollars, and it's in a bag at his feet. When the conversation is over he will walk away leaving it at Román's feet.

His plan is to confess to the theft, with Román holding the money. Morán calculates that he will serve three and a half years, then on release will share the money with Román, and they can both retire, modestly, and never work again - instead of working for another twenty-five years and having no life.

The hapless Román can't leave the $650,000 in the pizza house. The trouble - a source of suspense - is that there is a woman in Román's life, so there's a danger she will find the bag of cash he brings home from the pizza house and stashes up high in a cupboard.

In great heist movies, like the classic Rififi, the elaborately planned and faultlessly executed robbery is always followed by the slow débâcle when somebody squeals and it all falls apart. Moreno's long denouement is a prolonged - very prolonged - two-pronged joke. It involves a lot of travel into the country, several pretty women, and some extremely implausible coincidences.

The best joke is that practically all Morán's colleagues at the bank, except Román, get severely punished - or endlessly hassled, anyway - for Morán's theft, a crime they had nothing to do with: guilt by association, and the officious and aggressive browbeating of a female insurance investigator who stays at the bank making everybody miserable for a considerable while. Román is eventually made miserable too, forced to handle both windows on a monthly pay day, with a new replacement breathing down his neck.

I did not frankly always follow what was going on in those trips to the country to stash the money that turn into meet-ups with pretty women, etc. And the horses, and the stones and mountain lakes and swims. Crime movies are a genre where construction is normally neat and efficient, free of fat. They're best kept that way. The Delinquents may prove, for you, less hilarious and cool than it's reported to be - given that it lasts for three hours and (joke again) three minutes, a lot of which consists of digressions.

The Delinquents/Los delincuentes, 189 mins., debuted in Un Certain Regard at Cannes May 2023, showed at numerous international festivals, including the Main Slate of the NYFF, its US premiere, where it was screened Oct. 10, 2023 for this review. it's Argentina's official best foreign Oscar submission. Distributed by Mubi, Magnolia Pictures International and Cinema Tropical, it opens Opens Friday, Oct. 18, 2023 in theaters by Mubi. Metacritic rating: 92%.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.