Time after time: ‘The Delinquents’ and ‘Sixty Minutes’

"We have to find some sort of advantage. Outside, they don’t have any. And in here we have plenty of it. Time.” Morán (Daniel Elías), glowering and bloodied, listens to Garrincha (Germán de Silva) in the prison yard. He’s lingered too long on the communal phone and earned himself a beating. Soon, he’ll be paying a tribute to the old con for the privilege of an ‘easy time’ in prison. It’s unlikely he’s paying attention to the lecture, yet this is the most direct invocation of a central theme in The Delinquents: the passage of time.

Rodrigo Moreno’s 2023 film, streaming on MUBI, goes nowhere fast, in ways that are initially surprising and then beguiling. It’s three hours long, but Moreno doesn’t use the expansive length as many directors might, to add characters and subplots. Instead, there are discursions, repetitions, reveries. Time expands gently, turning our viewing meditative.

The overarching joke is that The Delinquents is, on the face of it, a heist movie. Indeed, the first 24 minutes detail the most leisurely bank robbery you are ever likely to see. Morán, a clerk in a Buenos Aires bank, goes about his day and eventually walks out with $650,000. Later, he meets up with Roman, a colleague from the bank. He tells him about the theft and proposes a deal: he will confess and go to jail for three years, while Roman keeps the money safe and splits it with him when he’s out. Roman isn’t keen but, after some convincing and a casual threat to implicate him, he agrees.

Roman—increasingly nervous to keep the money in the apartment he shares with his girlfriend—takes Morán’s advice and heads to the remote countryside. He stashes the loot there, and on the way back comes across three friendly strangers, who invite him over to share their lunch. He’s immediately infatuated with one of the women, who’s as carefree as he’s careworn. It’s the start of his growing realisation that, with the security of money, he now has time to reflect, even waste. We see him relax, speak ramblingly about a doggerel he once heard, play a geography game.

Visually too, Moreno shows time unfolding unhurriedly. Scenes are allowed to play out as they would in life—a cigarette break, a scooter pursuing a bus. The transitions are uniquely distended, images superimposed for 10, 15 seconds. It might sound like slow cinema but strikes me as more light-footed than what that genre usually offers. There’s Rohmer in the film’s talkiness and sun-kissed photography (by Alejo Maglio and Inés Duacastella), and Rivette and Ruiz in its sense of mischief (the names of five principal characters are anagrams). A revelation kicks off the final third of the film but this is just an excuse for the narrative to loop back in time and start another cycle of gradual self-discovery.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.