‘The Delinquents’ Review: A Deliciously Bizarre Existential Heist Movie That Wants You To Steal Back Your Life
Jessica Kiang Most of us know the illicit rush of the sick day slyly pulled when you’re not really sick. The turning you ignore on your commute, but that one day, for no real reason, you take. 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. Argentinian writer-director Rodrigo Moreno’s delightful “The Delinquents” knows the feeling too. Over the course of its droll, meandering, indefinably strange three hours, it may well persuade you that the crazy thing is not to break from your normal routine. The crazy thing is to ever go back. Filmmakers 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. 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 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. Even the vault door looks like it’s fed up of being a vault door, and is only continuing to function as such because that is all it knows.