Review ‘Los delincuentes’: is the $649,800 from a bank robbery the price of freedom, or not?

Morán calmly calculates it again on the calculator of the bank where he works: $ 12,996 per year, times 25 years, times two, that makes $ 649,800. Not much later, he walks out of the bank vault with a bag containing exactly that amount, plus some Argentine pesos, on his way to freedom.

The plan is simple, he explains to his colleague Román that evening, while they are standing at a bar opposite each other and eating a bite to eat. Morán will turn himself in and serve the minimum sentence for his theft, while Román must hide the money. Román agrees, and these two men become the ‘delincuentes’ from the title of Rodrigo Moreno’s fifth feature film.

The amount that Morán (Daniel Elías) calculates and takes with him is exactly what he and Román (Esteban Bigliardi) would earn together if they completed the 25 years until retirement at the bank. His reasoning is deceptively simple: better a few years in prison than another 25 years of the mundane confinement of an office job. Román has nothing to say against it.

Before Morán makes his move in what must be – in terms of loot and in the imagination of it – the most modest bank robbery in film history, Moreno opens Los delincuentes with a scene in which an elderly lady wants to cash a check, but it is rejected because her signature is too similar – even identical to – another signature in the bank’s files. This must first be extensively investigated. “It happens often,” a bank employee reassures the customer. “Some people even have identical lives.”

That client is played by Adriana Aizemberg, a celebrated actress in Argentina, and the mother of director Rodrigo Moreno, son of two famous actors. As a filmmaker, he emerged in the late 1990s within a wave of talented makers that became known as the Nuevo Cine Argentino.

On hot coals

The scene with Aizemberg seems like a dryly funny way to introduce the bank as a location and Morán and Román’s colleagues. And a nod to how interchangeable a life as an office slave can indeed be. But it is also a foreshadowing of one of the games that Moreno will play later in his film. Once Morán’s plan is in motion, the film mirrors the experiences of the two men – one in prison; the other at large, but on hot coals, with stolen money in his wardrobe and the hot breath of an investigator on his neck. Moreno emphasizes their shared fate because Morán’s cell block has the same layout as the bank’s workplaces, and because the criminal who has power in the prison is played by the same actor as the bank’s chief. Identical people.

So it has virtually unclassifiable Los delincuentes many more surprises in store during its playing time of over three hours. What about the two sisters named Norma (Margarita Molfino) and Morna (Cecilia Rainero) that Marón and Román meet separately in a village far outside Buenos Aires? To complete the anagram fun, there is also a filmmaker named Ramón around, and to push it over the top, Moreno zooms in on an American comic about the superhero Namor.

Three hours on the edge of your seat

Just as Morán and Román search for liberation from the monotony of their existence, Moreno seems to want to escape from every possible framework in which his film can be captured. Los delincuentes is successively a crime film from which all tension seeps away, a road movie that sticks right at the first stop, a western without cowboys, a summer romance that never ignites.

Time and again Moreno shows that he knows the laws of the genre in question very well, before he withdraws from them and veers in a different direction. Likes it that way Los delincuentes you’ll be on the edge of your seat for three hours, without too much happening in the film’s plot. The tension here is not in the story, but in the unpredictable way in which it is told.