![]() Morán goes to prison Román goes back to work. He eventually persuades Román (Esteban Bigliardi), an equally hangdog co-worker in a neck brace, to stash the cash in return for a cut. ![]() All he needs is someone to hide the money - not an outrageous sum, but the precisely calculated cumulative earnings he would have accrued between now and retirement age - while he waits out his sentence. By tomorrow, the robbery will be discovered and he will be arrested, but this is all part of his plan, which is less a mastermind’s gambit than a simple transaction: three years in prison, he estimates, in return for never having to work thereafter for the rest of his life. ![]() Morán glances into the camera that he knows is recording the theft, and leaves with the money. That vibe hasn’t changed in decades even if the decor has. It’s an atemporality that is useful for plotting but employed by Moreno mainly, one suspects, as visual shorthand for the worn-out drabness of working-schmo life. The clever, poker-faced production and costume design may evoke the synthetic fibers and analog telephones of the 1970s, but the set-dressing refuses to pin the film down to any specific era. The vault is no gleaming piece of “Mission: Impossible” engineering, but a scuffed, scruffy cell in which the note-counting machine keeps getting stuck mid-riffle. And yet, at the end of a workday in a basement lock-room, here is balding bank worker Morán, played with a perfectly defeated air of middle-management moral relativism by Daniel Elias, packing wads of notes into a concealed duffel bag. The crazy thing is to ever go back.įilmmakers have long been attracted to the heist format for the high drama it can generate, but Moreno begins his movie with a bank robbery so banal it’s hard to believe that’s actually what is going on. Argentinian writer-director Rodrigo Moreno’s delightful “ The Delinquents” knows the feeling too, and over the course of its droll, indefinably strange three hours, it may well persuade you that the crazy thing is not to break from your normal routine. Oh, that sudden, intoxicating sniff of freedom! It’s perhaps the closest thing that many of us get as adults to the ceaseless adventure we thought, as children, we’d be living. Most of us know the illicit rush of the sick day slyly pulled when you’re not really sick.
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