Morán (Brett Gelman lookalike Daniel Elías) works in a leadership role at a bank in Buenos Aires. From the minute we first see him, it’s clear he’s plotting something and it doesn’t take long to figure out what: Morán steals 650,000 American dollars from his employer and intends to never work another day in his life. Splitting the sum with his unsuspecting, somewhat dull coworker, Román (Esteban Bigliardi), Morán calculates he’ll retain the equivalent of his salary for the next 20 years. He foists the situation upon Román, who has little choice but to accept. It’s Morán’s plan to turn himself into the authorities, serve a rather minimal sentence and exit his imprisonment and enjoy the spoils. He tasks the nervous, hesitant Román with safekeeping the loot.
In Rodrigo Moreno’s remarkable fifth feature, The Delinquents, this narrative trajectory is both incredibly important and a little beside the point — it’s a film whose story is wound very tight, making us hang on every decision a character makes and the little ensuing impact it has on their life, but also a discursive experience that takes many detours and luxuriates in sensory details and side quests. But Moreno’s approach is never excessive or indulgent. Or it is, but only in the best and most rewarding ways. It’s a three-hour saga whose utterly cinematic lensing and philosophic curiosity distinguishes it from any kind of rote serialized crime thriller.
Moreno’s push and pull between narrative structure and unbounded stylistic immersion is closely linked to the film’s questioning and ultimate rejection of capitalism and urban, settled spaces altogether. Freedom is an idea that’s brought up time and again throughout the film, almost to a bludgeoning degree, and it discusses what in modern society holds us back from being free. Cell phones and limitations on smoking cigarettes indoors are raised, but the film (and, ultimately, the two principal characters) primarily targets a system that forces us to dedicate the majority of our lives to earning a living — “we only live to work,” Morán bemoans late in the movie. This, the filmmakers suggest, is the most oppressive constraint enacted upon us and is even less desirable than being locked up in jail. It makes for an excitingly anti-capitalist spirit that’s felt every time a Moreno lingers for longer than expected on a sweeping countryside vista or pans up away from the characters to gaze upon the cracks and faded textures of a concrete wall, even as a character is speaking out of frame. These deliberate, narratively purposeless visual excursions also often involve the natural world, as opposed to the more story-focused scenes that take place in the metropolis.
The film’s title card alone clues us into this thread, in a typically cheeky way devoid of self-regard: “Los delincuentes” is splashed across a street full of presumably “innocent” bystanders, implicating people at large, or at least city dwellers, as inherently being criminals. This shot includes Morán walking amongst other pedestrians, and it’s an image Moreno will echo several more times, observing our leads tangled up in a congested street view wide shot, or, alternatively, isolated in solitude in a wooded area or traversing the brush. The status of Morán and Román’s relationship to the country or the city in any given moment is crucial to where they are in their evolving conceptions of love, personal satisfaction and, yes, freedom.
Time itself is also considered a deciding factor in one’s freedom: “having time” versus a job eating up all of it and allotting one a paltry few vacation days per year. This is a self-conscious move for a film that is itself asking for our attention for an extended duration and one that uses that expansive canvas to both invest us in a story and set us free in its sounds, sights and ideas.
In a way that’s never showboating or flamboyant, The Delinquents is technically stunning. The camera placement and angle choices by Moreno and cinematographer Alejo Maglio are consistently inventive and clever, as seen in an early frame where Morán eavesdrops on Román telling their boss that he’s going to a doctor’s appointment. The way the shot is laid out, we can see all three men, but all are in distinct visual planes. Like many moments in the film, it renders a seemingly straightforward sequence arresting and unusual.
The editing, jointly handled by Karen Akerman, Manuel Ferrari and Nicolás Goldbart, might be the film’s greatest and most fetching stroke. Employing devastating, classical dissolves, the trio simultaneously contrasts and melds the depictions of the two main characters, their separate existences linked or stratified by a reach for a cigarette, a bout of passionate lovemaking or a wave of deep thought. The cutting is used to elide and reveal in graceful fashion too: a key part of Morán’s story is left unseen until over two-thirds of the way through the film in a way that doesn’t feel cheap but, rather, like so much of the film, the work of a possibly masterful artist.
It’s with this latter reveal that The Delinquents becomes something of a love triangle and its status as a great yarn, in addition to being an aesthetic achievement, is cemented. It’s a Count of Monte Cristo-esque story of romance and liberation with several other layers and dimensions beneath that, processed with a considerable amount of self-awareness and finesse.
Photo courtesy of MUBI
The post The Delinquents appeared first on Spectrum Culture.