Heist movies are usually run by the clock and upon a tense pile-up of plot data, but the new Argentine film The Delinquents, selected for this year’s New York Film Festival, is more like a luxuriant, meandering, sometimes irreverent soap opera, with as much time for detours and ruminations as for the mechanics of mega-theft. And it has an ax to grind, against a modernity that might necessitate robbing a bank instead of devoting decades to it as a wage slave. It’s so Gen Z, so thickly bearded and Arcadian-daydreamy, you can practically smell the avocado toast. At an unrushed three-plus hours, director Rodrigo Moreno’s fifth solo film opts less for genre-film nuts-and-bolts and more for basking in its own patient search for happiness, which in the end doesn’t have much to do with money.
But it begins, by way of contrast, in the life of a Buenos Aires banker, Morán (Daniel Elias; think an unshowboaty Seth Rogen), whose morning routine is a solitary tea in his empty apartment and then an unadventurous march across town to work. In the bank, he supervises the shepherding of cash stacks (pesos and dollars) in and out of the safes and into the tellers’ drawers. (Moreno takes his time here; you learn a few things about commercial banking procedures.) But we see Morán listening, watching his colleagues, cooking in his head — and eventually, when a staff shortage allows him to descend to the safe alone, he fills a duffel with cash, knowing he’s on camera, and walks out to the street.
Moreno has fun with sly intrusions, splitting the screen between the two men in two different worlds as they both light up, spasming with Godardian jump cuts, panning to off-screen action as a kind of visual punchline.
His macro plan is more complex — first Morán meets a grumpy coworker, Roman (Esteban Bigliardi) for a beer, and pinholes him as a co-conspirator, after the fact. If Roman hides the money while Morán does a short prison stretch, then in a few years they’ll both be work-free for life. If he doesn’t, Morán will say that Roman was in on it from the top. The scene is played calmly, in a public café, with about half as much tension as we might expect — Roman is shocky, but he’s also into the gamble. Now is when we notice the film’s methodical pacing: As Morán contentedly wanders south into the countryside, a man with nothing left to lose (he even throws his apartment keys into the trash), Roman stashes the money in the small flat he shares with his special-ed-teacher girlfriend, and begins to sweat. The hush-hush investigation at the bank begins, fraying everyone’s nerves. Eventually, Morán surrenders to the authorities, and his tougher-than-he-thought years in prison begin.
We’re only at halftime, and Moreno has only begun to dawdle. From there, Roman is sent to hide the money in the Patagonian foothills, a ramble that’s paralleled in the film’s loosey-goosey structure with Morán’s earlier, pre-surrender walkabout, both journeys imbued with a let’s-slow-down swoon over the region’s peaceful, shambolic way of life. This idealization of the wilderness’s anti-rat-race is embodied by Norma, a lithe, calm Earth mother played by Margarita Molfino, whom both men, at different times, fall in love with. (And yes, the names are all anagrams, including several others, another impulsive gesture toward whimsical duality.)
The love lines get complicated, but Moreno’s film never tenses up — even Morán’s prison tribulations (extortions, beatings) reach an equilibrium off-screen, somehow, and acquire a lyrical voice with Morán’s communal recitations of the ambling, nationally iconic poem by Ricardo Zelarayán “The Great Salt Flats,” which for Argentinians hardly needs to be name-checked. In fact, The Delinquents’ own wrestle with narrative progression reflects and compounds the characters’ toggle toward slacking off, a sort of devolution from a genre film to a Rohmer-esque hangout, when it’s otherwise not simply making a great vacation-porn case for Patagonia. Along the way, Moreno has fun with sly intrusions, splitting the screen between the two men in two different worlds as they both light up, spasming with Godardian jump cuts, panning to off-screen action as a kind of visual punchline. Without being jokey, the filmmaker insists on an implied bemusement. As in this month’s other NYFF find, Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, The Delinquents ultimately defies its formulaic set-up — the hidden money is almost forgotten — and opts for obliquity. But here, the strategy is part of the film’s hedonistic philosophy, its slouching toward neo-hippie-ness. ❖
Michael Atkinson has been writing for the Village Voice since 1994. His latest book is the new edition of his BFI tract on David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.