los delinquentes (w&d rodrigo moreno)

Moreno’s lauded film has echoes of what would probably be described as Lo Ola Nueva, if more attention was paid globally to some of the remarkable cinema emerging from Argentina over the course of the past decade or so. This movement is headlined by Mariano Llinás, Santiago Mitre and Laura Citarella, but it is a generous and expansive community, one of whose key figures, Laura Paredes, has a small role in Moreno’s film. The movement, which would probably never recognise itself as such, is a broad church, but there is the sense of a unifying aesthetic, in the way it riffs off a skewed naturalism and a willingness to embrace a circuitous (and often drawn-out) form of storytelling, which holds little regard for the dictums of the script gospels.

At three hours, with the film self-consciously dividing itself into two parts, Los Delinquentes swims in this slipstream. Its meandering narrative starts in classic genre fashion, as Morán, a disillusioned bank employee, seizes his chance to effect a robbery. He then manages to drag the unwitting Román in as an accomplice, after the fact. However, the film soon moves beyond recognisable genre traits. Morán hands himself in, as Ramón tries to cope with the stress of his involvement. The action moves from Buenos Aires to the rural hills of the Cordoba countryside. Both men inadvertently fall in love with the same woman, further complicating things. As it evolves, the film feels like a meditation on city versus countryside, on the values of the working life, on the unattainable nature of happiness. All of this is processed in a leisurely fashion, with the narrative, charged by the dramatic punch of Morán’s initial theft, slowly unwinding like a spring which is loosing its kinetic power.

It’s intriguing seeing the film on the same day as the presidential debate in Argentina, a debate between a crazy maverick and a company man. Argentina appears to be a country which exists in a state of permanent economic crisis, although when you visit, this is barely noticeable. In a sense, Morán and Ramón’s theft of a lovingly filmed suitcase full of dollars, the camera lingering over the wads of bills as they are stacked and counted like something out of The Italian Job, ends up feeling like a Macguffin. The money is far less important, for both men, than the journey they go on as a result of their actions. The impulse to resolve our human problems through the acquisition of dollars is an illusory one. The wild yonder, with all its promise and beauty, is out there no matter what. In the same way, the film’s inconclusive denouement, threatening a conflict which is never realised, seems to be arguing that our cinematic need for narrative resolutions is also delusional: there’s nothing wrong with sitting through three hours just to find out that there is no ending, just an endless morass of verdant hills.