‘The Delinquents’: Cannes Review

Dir/scr: Rodrigo Moreno. Argentina, Luxembourg, Brazil, Chile. 2023. 189mins

The lives of two employees in a drab, stifling Buenos Aires bank are intertwined – and upended – when one of them, Moran (Daniel Elias), steals several hundred thousand dollars from the vault and persuades the other, Ramon (Esteban Bigliardi), to hide the money until Moran has served the resulting prison sentence. It is a fairly familiar crime thriller setup, yet this playful, effortlessly engrossing picture from Rodrigo Moreno takes a series of deliciously confounding turns. Leisurely, elliptical, enigmatic but guided with a sure hand, the film is preoccupied with duality: work versus leisure, routine versus spontaneity, restriction versus freedom, familiarity versus discovery. While the generous running time can feel a little overstretched in the final hour, for the most part, this is a rewarding, humorous fable that meanders between the city and the Cordoba hills, via lakes, hills and a stint in prison.

 The kind of boldly digressive and immersive storytelling that delights festival audiences

It’s the fourth solo-directed fiction feature from Moreno (a prominent figure in the New Argentine Cinema movement of the 1990s), who also has several documentaries and jointly directed projects on his CV. It’s also his first film to screen in Cannes: his first two features, El Custodio (2006) and A Mysterious World (2011) bowed in competition in Berlin, where El Custodio won the Alfred Bauer award, while most recent feature, Reimon (2014), premiered at Rotterdam. Interest in the picture should be keen following its premiere in Un Certain Regard: The Delinquents is the kind of boldly digressive and immersive storytelling that delights festival audiences, and could connect with a similar audience to that of Alexandre Koberidze’s similarly teasing and agile picture What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?

“There are people with the same name. There are people with the same life”, says assistant bank manager Marianela (Mariana Chaud). She’s wrestling with an admin issue – a female customer has exactly the same signature as one of the bank’s other clients, and the protocol for dealing with the problem is unclear. But while Marianela’s comment seems to be a throwaway observation, it is, in fact, a key to much that follows – a key that might not fully unlock the film’s tangle of ideas, but one that certainly provides a clue to the preoccupations that have shaped the story.

Roman and Moran share plenty, not least the same letters in their names. The anagrammatic theme extends further: Roman and Moran separately meet two free-spirited sisters in the wild Cordoba countryside: Norma (Margarita Molfino), who is the love interest for both men, and Morna (Cecilia Rainero). And then there’s also Ramon (Javier Zoro), a filmmaker who lives with the woman and recruits them all to work on his project, a documentary about gardens.

While Roman and Moran might not literally be the same person, they can be seen to represent two sides of the same personality; Roman is the more impulsive of the two, Moran is more cautious and circumspect, and prone to spiralling worries. But the crime – both the act and what it represents for the future – unleashes something unpredictable in both of them. Moreno eloquently uses colour to explore the shift: it is not just the film’s palette that changes – Roman’s skin tone warms, from the rainy cement grey of his complexion when he was caught in the endless grafting cycle of work, to a honeyed, healthy glow. Even when he’s in jail, he seems to be in a better place. Moran, meanwhile, takes stock of a life that has settled into a safe, unexciting routine, and allows himself to take risks.

Evocative music choices add considerably to the film’s appeal, most notably several lush, accordion-heavy pieces by Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla. Blues guitarist Pappo, whose vinyl album is another link between the characters, also features on the soundtrack, his song ’Where Is Freedom?’ provides a clue to the film’s unexpected closing sequence. A stash of money is all well and good. But freedom is priceless.