Rodrigo Moreno's The Delinquents is screening exclusively on MUBI in many countries.
The Delinquents (Rodrigo Moreno, 2023).
Words have no owner. They simply are. They live in the speakers of a language, but no one has possession of a verb or a noun. If anyone can come close to such ownership, it is an artist, who puts the word in a complex combination that is theirs alone. A filmmaker's material is not words—though some might say a shot is its equivalent—but rather the world. Through framing, cutting, and duration, the director makes a movie their own, yet what is shot does not obey the will of the filmmaker. The material of the world is the filmmaker's lyrics, and the world does not belong to them.
The arrangement and rearrangement of material—whether of words or of the world when it is filmed—into new works of art can be linked to a noble tradition in Argentina. You could call it the noble tradition of thieves. The work's creator has died, but the tradition persists as a ghost. No one writes in this economically unstable country, always on the verge of annihilation, without considering that the language we speak and write in was created by Jorge Luis Borges. He left a playful cartography of everything that can be done with words. To explain himself a little, the teacher had the delicacy to publish a short essay in 1951 titled “The Argentine Writer and Tradition.” He postulated that the men and women of the South live far from everything, in a country that is still almost virgin. He understood that, due to Argentina’s geographical position, those who write here—one could also say, those who film—are so curious about what has been said and discovered in other latitudes that they try out all the distant signs until they transform them into their own alphabet, with which they invent, imagine, and create.
This is an insolent procedure of total absorption through which many traditions can be held in the imagination of a writer (or filmmaker), a montage of incommensurable worlds that become homogeneous. Under such influences, the artist can ignore the interdictions and fervors that tradition usually transfers to its guardians. A good recent example can be seen in Mariano Llinás’s La flor (2018), a limitless film that celebrates this loving homogenization throughout, but most obviously when Jean Renoir's A Day in the Country (1936) is vampirized by the filmmaker and brought into proximity with the “criollo”—an aesthetic of the gaucho—universe of Argentina. In the noble tradition of thieves, those who do not belong can try unexpected things and can achieve something completely different from, and perhaps even impossible for, those who were born in the heart of a tradition.
The director Rodrigo Moreno is not unaware of this tradition. In a beautiful passage from his latest film, The Delinquents, Moreno introduces through sound—as is appropriate in this case—a scene close to the end of L’argent (1983). After a few seconds, we can recognize a shot from that clairvoyant Robert Bresson film, and a little later, another emblematic shot. The quotation comes after a long section of footage, as if The Delinquents wasn’t only quoting but itself was under the influence of the French filmmaker. Indeed, another tradition is carefully added to the film. In the robbery scenes at the beginning of The Delinquents, the antiquated furniture and dominating color palette of the targeted bank refer to Bresson's final film. It is not a quote, nor a tribute; it is a loan without return, or a legitimate mode of appropriation. Bresson did it like no one else: that is why the gesture is repeated. The poetic key to the tradition of this kind of thieving is in stealing many things at the same time and immediately interweaving them to compose something new.
Hardly a Criminal (Hugo Fregonese, 1949).
Foremost among The Delinquents’s borrowed sources is the opening plot of a classic of Argentine cinema: Hardly a Criminal (Apenas un delincuente, 1949). Yet even the director of this masterpiece, Hugo Fregonese, himself appropriated a tradition, that of American crime cinema. That film’s thrilling opening chase, ending with the overturning of the thieves' car, could well have been taken from a scene from They Live By Night or Raw Deal, to quote emblematic 1948 film noirs. That genre was nothing more than the stylization of the decadence that followed the first global financial crisis of the 20th century. It is not in its story but its tone that Hardly a Criminal refers to the noir. But Fregonese does not copy, he appropriates. Only an Argentine filmmaker could have thought of including the scene in which Morán, Hardly a Criminal’s embezzling protagonist, arrives from Mar del Plata after having allowed himself to be caught by the police, a passage that speaks to the Argentine idiosyncrasy like few others. Morán was arrested while playing at a casino, thus obtaining an alibi to claim that he gambled away the stolen money. Fregonese includes a revealing sequence: the criminal arrives in Buenos Aires by train and a crowd waits for him at the station as if he were a Hollywood star. His is a feat that would be seen as a shameful act in another society, and not as the cunning of an individual confronted by a credit institution. Borges himself sensed that this disagreement between criollo individualism and the State was a way of being one of his fellow men.
Moreno begins The Delinquents with a preface that invokes Fregonese’s film, a meticulous presentation of the city of Buenos Aires with special attention paid to its buildings. Here Moreno is a geometer, a visual architect who frames the city as if he is drawing it rather than filming it. The architects’ blueprints for buildings become a filmmaker’s blueprints for cinema. Moreno dispenses with the voice-over that Fregonese used to present a philosophy of 1940s sociality; he prefers the eloquence of a shot of the morning sun slowly illuminating Morán’s outfit. In The Delinquents, Morán (Daniel Elías) works in a bank, and his uniform is the clothing of misfortune and monotony. This comic dreariness is later echoed by a coworker’s magnificent joke about the similarity that all lives have, a form of serial existence that denies singular existence. In the same early scene, another joke is about the duplication of signatures. A elderly client shows up at the bank with the same signature as another unknown client with a different last name—how can this be possible? The coincidence is absurd, but we can take from it an indirect confession: Hardly a Criminal and The Delinquents have similar lyrics, but they are not the same. The principle of duplication is a constant (for example, the names of the main characters sharing the same letters, Morán and Román, but in a different order; having another actor playing two different, antithetical characters), but the copy is never identical.
In Hardly a Criminal, Morán learns by chance that if he defrauds his company for the equivalent of two decades’ worth of salary, he would only receive a maximum of six years in prison, which, with good behavior, could be reduced to three. Existential mathematics is too seductive. The option requiring the least time lost—three years in prison, versus twenty years working—is the least painful. In The Delinquents, Morán follows this same reasoning. The first deviation from Fregonese is that the financial company is replaced by a bank. The second is the fact that Morán is the one who has reasoned this scheme out rather than discovering it, and the final key one is that he involves a co-worker, Román (Esteban Bigliardi), whom he enlists to help hide the cash. In other words, what the two films have in common are their premises and the way they initially drift, but after that point, Moreno completely distances himself from Fregonese. He returns, instead, to an obsession that marks all of the director’s films: the use of time or, more precisely, the unproductive dimension of time.
The Delinquents (Rodrigo Moreno, 2023).
The Delinquents progresses from a place of work—bank jobs, daily toil—to a place of free time that cannot be measured by productivity or monetary value. This is set in motion by quotations from two very different but essential poets who capture a dissociation between time and utility; this intensifies perception and transforms the world into an endless scene of aesthetic stimuli. There is a key scene in The Delinquents in which we can observe the intersection of these two opposing conceptions of temporal consciousness: capitalistic and aesthetic. At a certain point in the story, Román travels to the province of Córdoba in search of a town where Morán has chosen to hide part of the stolen money. (The dollar Morán kept in his own house will remain under a rock.) As Román hikes through the countryside, he comes upon two sisters and a man relaxing by a river. The sisters offer lodging to visitors, and the man is making a film about the wind. It is evident that they lead an austere, not to say impoverished, life. They have all the time in the world. Time does not pass for them; rather, they are in time. They let themselves be in it.
That encounter is decisive, because Román has already fulfilled his objective of hiding the money and is beginning his return, but the group invites him to stay and eat. He says no, then hesitates, then agrees. The love story that is born from this passage has an undeniable dramatic importance, but what is more relevant and less visible is what rushes into the character's consciousness and then flows out into the story itself. From this point on, the film slows down and branches out into fragments. The narrative, previously moving uninterrupted toward a destination, is intercepted by another force of time. This interruption creates a poetic drift that dissolves continuity—introducing another experience of time: the instant that expands without advancing. It is the time of poetry, of unproductive literature par excellence, and the film features two great exponents of 20th-century Argentine literature, both from the province of Entre Ríos: the poets Juan Laurentino Ortiz and Ricardo Zelarayán.
The Ortiz poem cited in The Delinquents is “Fui el río” (“I went to the river”), taken from an early book of his, El ángel inclinado (1937). It is a long verse that explores the dislocation of experience and its memory: a man spends time at the river, and upon returning home, is able to reconstruct and understand the pleasure of his experience in the wilderness. All of Ortiz's poetry is crossed by a meticulous observation of the ecosystem dominated by the rivers of his province, its effects on language and, consequently, the experience of those who live around a similar landscape. The enchantment of Ortiz's verse is found in its vitalistic materialism; in it, an individual's fleeting passage through life is justified by showing a world full of microscopic life forms. In The Delinquents, contemplation is an act of conscience, a detour, a late learning for the characters. In this sense, some sequences of the country filmmaker shooting the wind and the film's final sequence of Morán on horseback belong to a dissident gesture of allowing oneself to be carried away by the flow of time.
Ortiz's world is pure immanence and discreet celebration:
El corazón dice: criaturas terrestres, la vida es gloriosa, alzaos hasta el fuego armonioso como hasta la sangre del éxtasis para que todos seáis como simientes ardiendo para las cosechas sucesivas de la luz común que encenderá hasta la sombra y la estrellará como un jardín.
The heart says: terrestrial creatures, life is glorious, rise yourselves up to the harmonious fire, to the blood of ecstasy so that all of you may be burning seeds for the successive harvest of the common light that will ignite even the shadow and burst open like a garden.
The Delinquents (Rodrigo Moreno, 2023).
In the second part of The Delinquents, and halfway through the last act, Morán, still in prison, receives in his hands a copy of the collected poetry of Ricardo Zelarayán. Morán is shown in different spaces and times reading several stanzas from the extensive poem “La gran salina” (“The Great Salt Mine”). The forcefulness of the chosen passages is evident, as is the reading experience in the prisoner’s mind. It is precisely while reading in prison—where time withdraws into itself, and the instant is experienced as repetition without differentiation—that Morán becomes conscious of the punishment of space, devoid of movement and time without a project.
Zelarayán states in that poem:
La palabra misterio ya no explica nada. (El misterio es nada y la nada no se explica por sí misma) Habría que reemplazar la palabra misterio (al menos por este “poema”) por lo que siento cuando pienso en los trenes de carga que pasan de noche por la Gran Salina.
The word mysterious no longer explains anything. (The mystery is nothing and the void is not explained by itself.) The word mysterious must be replaced (at least by this “poem”) for what I feel when I think in the cargo trains that pass at night by the Great Salt Mines.
The poem glosses a mood that could well be that of a prisoner. As long as he does not renounce his reason, the mystery of existence is insufficient consolation for being imprisoned. That the prison’s teacher proposes this text is an unequivocal provocation, because the poem extends the experience of consciousness in confinement. The poem reveals that the cosmos is an accident devoid of enigmas. It is not a universe, like that of Ortiz, whose signs are transformed into stimuli for astonishment. Instead, language is aligned with a dimension of reason. Mystery is replaced by lucidity: it is preferable to see how things—all things—are; to acquire the unusual skill of observing within the minuscule the ultimate inconsistency of everything in existence.
Ortiz has his followers today, but he remains a peripheral figure in Argentine literature. The same happened with Zelarayán, an even more marginal poet in the canon of national literature. It is a real-life poet who introduces the prisoners (and Moreno himself) in The Delinquents to Zelarayán's work. Fabián Casas, a writer and poet of the same generation as Moreno, is the smuggler of Zelarayán's verses in the film, and plays a similar role outside of it, as well. Casas, who for some time has been working as a scriptwriter with Lisandro Alonso (Carta a Serra, Jauja, and Eureka) and is responsible for the fantastical turn in the cinema of the director of La libertad (2001), writes very differently from the two aforementioned masters, but his writing does serve as a kind of conjunction between the indeterminacy of the poetic word and its translation into the domain of cinema. Both poets are inimitable; they do not beget offspring. One can only quote them, and the way Moreno does it is exemplary. In fact, citing them is a reason for joy, as the act of citation recognizes that there are those who have passed through realms of perception that are remembered entirely through lucid verses.
Finally, it is necessary to add a few words about the famous Argentine guitarist known as Pappo. He is the legendary father of Argentine rock, an unavoidable musician between the late '60s and the following two decades; he never stood out for his lyrics, but rather for his guitar solos and indelible riffs. His music is featured prominently in The Delinquents, and Moreno not only evokes him as a rocker of yesteryear, but also recognizes the primitive beauty of the lyrics in his first songs, isolating a question in that circumspect rhetoric that faithfully synthesizes the entire film: “Where is freedom?” The question acquires, in the present context of Argentina, a sense of anguish. What is undeniable is that Moreno had enough freedom to borrow from different sources, singularly transforming every element that he lovingly stole from other creators.
The Delinquents (Rodrigo Moreno, 2023).