Movie Mahal

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I wonder if the logic behind Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents emerged from the anti-work movement, a post Covid phenomenon that saw many quit their jobs because they didn’t want to continue working in a torturous capitalist system geared towards monotony, compliance and exploitation. In the doubling equation Moreno poses the question; what if people make the same choices when situated in similar contexts? In this case, Moran (Daniel Elías) and Roman (Esteban Bigliardi) are a mirror image; the same person who are intertwined in different ways but ultimately searching for a way out of the urban grind. Unfolding over three hours, Moreno’s choice to open with an unlikely bank heist signifies the comforts of genre. If anything, notions of the suspense thriller run through the narrative with a disregarding subtlety but the excursions into the rural undertaken by both Moran and Roman taps into something far more experiential; the search for an alternative life, untethered from the nothingness of modern life.

Ironically, Norma (Margarita Molfino), a free-spirited country girl whom both Moran and Roman fall in love with winces at their dreamy aspirations as ridiculous. Of course, what Moran doesn’t quite account for when he commits the bank robbery is the price that comes with stepping out of a routine that has ensnared you but also springs no sudden traps. Moran’s deviancy is frowned upon by everyone in the bank and the system metes out a collective punishment upon the workers. However, Roman’s complicity in legitimising Moran’s supposedly deviant actions indicates an unconscious, repressed solidarity with the supposed delinquents who dare to stick two fingers up at a system in which work is a totemic prison that asphyxiates pretty much everyone these days.