The Delinquents: Argentinian Filmmakers Crafting Fiction in a World of Inflation

Anagrams between Nature

On Rodrigo Moreno's The Delinquents (2023)

The plot is simple: In Buenos Aires, Morán (Daniel Elías), a worker at the bank, steals, from his workplace, over 650,000 U.S. dollars in cash - 25 years of future compensation - and vows never to work again. He finds an accomplice in his colleague, Román (Esteban Bigliardi), to hide the score in secret while he serves three years and a half in prison, voluntarily - in exchange for time to secure his future freedom.

Money is the most curious thing in cinema. Entire enterprise was built upon this idea, while entire genres were built upon its images, from Busby Berkeley's opening musical number of Gold Diggers of 1933 to films by Preston Sturges, from Nicholas Ray's They Live by Night to, decades later, Bonnie and Clyde. These are films of dreamers, either of people in poverty hit by unexpected fortunes or of people who dreamed a touch bolder, who dared to take them by force. The same can be said about the real world. But, as an image, the material of money was only truly filmed when Robert Bresson performed his ballet between the camera and the hands, first in Pickpocket and decades later in L'argent. With Bresson, the idea of filming money was to film its concealment. These papery and highly foldable objects are the master of space precisely because they hide too well between the hands, the pockets, and the very world which they rule, except that in our increasingly cashless society, this very material of money has but vanished. This idea of cash in bundles, cash in deposit boxes, or cash in vaults has no longer strings in reality but is only associated with heist films, organized crime, and fraudulent online marketing. The material has turned into a veil that dominates our lives.

So, when Rodrigo Moreno's The Delinquents opened with Morán's traversing to the vault beneath his workplace - for him, a morning routine, except we can't help but perceive it as a trespassing - any "robberies" would have been working in progress. It would seem like we're already in the Dostoevskian realm of Pickpocket, but the little knowledge coded inside the image and sound - the clicking of metal doors and keyholes, the spiraling of counting machines, the unmistakeable pattern of the U.S. dollar bills - would immediately suggest the familiar plot in Hollywood heist films or those by Jean-Pierre Melville, but sans the stylization that implies impending fate at play: the machines here are simply running, like any other day. Morán is no master of crime; rather, he is a de-facto film buff, playing out the premise of an old movie, Apenas un Delincuente (1949), a landmark Argentinean noir by filmmaker Hugo Fregonese, who, after its success, launched a career in Hollywood, with a notable mastery with the offscreen, in such films like Apache Drums (1951). But when Morán ultimately submits himself in this movie scenario, each shot reveals no excess in suspense or beauty, as we witness his stashing of the cash and the eventual getaway. If offscreen is important to Moreno's characterization, it is because that dream has not yet been delivered, but one felt the desire to film the cash, in the material's decisive image, weightless in its form but fatal as an entity, an idea. In Fregonese's film, the robbery itself is hardly shown, while the film ends with the dying body of the protagonist (also Morán), with bills burning beside, a fateful conclusion to a bitter moral tale: it is not only his desire for the high life that killed Morán, but the desperation mounted in his family, which reputation and lives he had destroyed. But with Moreno, the money must be filmed, which seemed like nothing by itself but powerful in relation to the person maneuvering it, by our association that this could be a person's lifesaving. The U.S. dollars and Argentinean pesos in their respective bags would remain in their banal, papery substances, while the promise engraved within can only be that of the man, whose journey only begins afterward. But the fact that the image of man and his money does not immediately spell out a future is the reason for it to remain an image, an unknown, a time suspended. We are buying back time, after all. To present an unlikely sum of cash, some concealed in a bag, as the lifetime capital for one or two average worker(s) is a mystical yet fearsome notion, which is to say that the relationship between the human being and money is material, bodily, which is to say it is existential, according to Rivette, something “doesn't reside in pure ideas.” [1] We must reread like Morán did, in prison, from night and day, the poem from Argentinean poet and novelist Ricardo Zelarayán, that “the word mystery needs to be squashed / like a flea is squashed, / between two thumbs. / The word mystery doesn't explain anything now.” [2]

Moreno's film is unconcerned with the melodrama. Even the looming intervention from the law and the system, in turn, had likewise turned out to be trivial concerns, an obligation, which mounts to scenes of comedic terror since the corporation doesn't wish to acknowledge the robbery in public, with their loss quickly remanded by the insurance company. Once again, a grander system is at play, which mechanic is more invisible than our protagonists' very concrete action. This would leave Morán and Román searching for their promises of life from their interior design. "I'm looking at a map . . . / but this explains nothing." By playing a word game on "Morán" and "Román," plus more variations to follow, the director also proposes an inner fiction in front of the reality which he filmed: as parallel lives are now unfolding to disturb the supposed utopianism of the scenario: we are already moving away from the moral tragedy of L'argent, but towards the fantastical interior world of Bresson/Dostoevsky's "alienated dreamer" - we recall the young protagonist of Quatre nuits d'un rêveur (1971) and, in the film's first sequence, his rolling about on the countryside grass. [3] However, since the filmmaker is playful, we suspect he wishes no explicit outcomes from the game but only to proliferate exchanges among the elements of the world: to have his characters go through similar places and experiences, and particularly, to have them be with nature. After committing the robbery and trading the score, Morán made his leisurely "escape" to the countryside. Drawing from the principle of Renoir's Une partie de campagne (1946), the heist film now assumes a fluid travelogue form. If this would suggest an approach towards an unfiltered naturalism, with a certain "lightness" that would seem too easy an escape, the filmmaker, instead, opts for a dialectic between lightness and danger, which is not the same as that of the city and nature, because this exodus from the city must not be taken for granted as such - the "traveling films" by Renoir or Rohmer (La rayon verte, Les Nuits de la pleine lune) were never "easily" light, even those by Jacques Rozier (Adieu Philippine, Du côté d'Orouët). The music that often accompanies Morán/Román's pastoral wanderings, a very strange "Suite for Oboe and String Orchestra" by Astor Piazzolla, with a combination of lyrical beauty and ominous foreboding, is a gesture in-between that paints this picture.

Although we are always charmed by the utopian, even primitive air that is in harmony with nature, cinema has always been a modern art, akin to the city and the structure of urban life, and cinema always faces the danger of taking nature for granted, as merely a place for escape - reducing nature as a resort town. "Real" provincial auteurs are much too rare. If Moreno, a critic who knows the history of cinema well, chose film noir as his starting point, it is because the tradition of these B-movies, often associated with the nocturnal, the concrete of urban life, and always a vessel for inner fantasies for the impoverished, had likely found its root in the quintessential traveling film, Sunrise (1927) by F.W. Murnau, whose work was summarized as "the transportation between the city and the country," by Jean-Pierre Léaud in La maman et la putain (1973) - the epitome of city film, in which Jean Eustache reduced Paris to a handful of streets, cafes and apartments. In Sunrise, with its couple, we witnessed the explosion of modernity - there was too much to see, with the various offerings of the city viewed with definitive wonder - which they experienced under the shadow of death, with the husband's troublesome attempt to murder his wife, after lured by a city woman who was the modern desire incarnate, the first femme fatale. Thus, the couple's ecstatic encounter with the urban can never cease to be with this danger, this violence, which they must reconcile.

If The Delinquents is Sunrise reversed, then it is precisely the presence of Román, who is terrified of getting caught and, more deeply, who lacks the initial desire of his counterpart, that upsets the film. Husband of Flor - a music teacher - whose two students occupy their confined home as if the couple’s own, Román possesses an image of the family man which will remain an image, but it will be these children who will compose rhymes for his later journey. Thus, Moreno films his voyage to the faraway town of Alpa Corral (671 kilometers from Buenos Aires) with more intensity. Juxtaposed with an imprisoned Morán narrating the direction to his secret path, we finally discover the novelistic movement akin to Argentinean cinema, and then, a meditative sequence in which the camera's gaze lingers on a hill, where Román will stash the money. However, it is Román's return trip from the country that proved to fascinate more, uttering the film into its second part. The trite but dangerous entity of money has now transformed into something else, something invaluable, and if our dreamers wish to be with nature, then we are essentially dealing with time itself. To film landscape, to film a stone, to be one with the history of time. But we will not be returning to the old cliché that "time is money," time is time, and by the end of the film, we are shocked not by its final shot but by a boy dressed in red, in real life Moreno's own, suddenly a teenager. The prison time originated from the film's fiction was also the reality of its shooting.

In 1927, Sunrise was Murnau's first film made in Hollywood, where producer William Fox offered him unparalleled technical wealth. Nearly a century later, the entity that allowed Murnau to make Sunrise had long perished, and the desire to desert the monstrosity that is the film industry has never been stronger. However, the festival circuit still reigns, which mainly is the gentrification of every notion of filmmaking, from the concept of "auteur" to the very idea of "independence." This is the film's second thesis, which links together nature with the act of filmmaking itself. In the film's second part, the trio of characters, all named in anagrams with M-O-R-A-N, are introduced as filmmakers making a landscape film but, more evidently, are just living a pastoral existence. If Moreno has little desire to reconcile the all too sordid paradoxes between the urban men's daily travail and occasional "spare time," where "you go to the beach, and you find the same people," his only hypothesis is to discover, in filmmaking, this art that's intrinsic with the industrial age, a little bit of "nature," or perhaps even a little "mystery" or "fiction", to play against the warning of a certain poet. To do so, he needs nature to perform his game of anagrams, of exchanging elements: to make films is to live with the earth, to accept what's given to us by the world, although the film remains firmly in the male psyche, and Norma (Margarita Molfino), the woman who both men had encountered and passionated by, remains a too-often obscure figure, but the incompleteness of her story intrigues and anticipates the duplicity of the men's: Norma leaves but with something left behind, and it would be the same for the men, as well. The narrative returns to that of the dreamer’s, suspending the film at the last minute. At the end of his film, each person is in their solitude, reminding us of a short text written by Serge Daney, months before his death in 1992, that cinema should have a "capacity for loneliness," which gives people "own tonality, a deaf anger or a desolate song, as an obligation to 'do with' the little that is left to them." [4] In Moreno's non-ending, the characters' solitude, with what "is left" of them, suggests a meeting of tomorrow.

These never-ending stories had many draw a connection between Moreno and the works from the prolific El Pampero Cine, the Argentinean collective behind La Flor (2018) and Historias extraordinarias (2008) by Mariano Llinás, Trenque Lauquen (2022) by Laura Citarella, and many more. Moreno himself had once appeared there as an actor, in Alejo Moguillansky's Por el dinero (2019), "For the Money." If one should draw a connection between these works, it wouldn't be a purely aesthetic or narrative one, but an aesthetic based on their shared concern over the economics of filmmaking, evident in many of Moguillansky's work, where the financial struggle of a family - Moguillansky's own, with his partner Luciana Acuña and daughter Cleo - made for a stage of comedic auto-fiction, filmed in minimal budgets with consumer-grade cameras, which is, in the same way, how they made their "grand" epics, without "production values" or government funding, which are the same thing, but always with actors, landscapes, music and a desire for fiction. These filmmakers, all of them encyclopedists, have a simple goal: to keep making films, and in-between their time-consuming novels (La Flor, Trenque Lauquen, or whatever Llinas is doing right now), they made made sketch films, little homey slapsticks for themselves. In Moguillansky—Acuña's recent film, La edad media (2022), one of the many pandemic-era comedies shot by El Pampero members in their confined homes, revolves around a child's (Cleo) calculating "mise-en-scene" of purchasing a space telescope during the height of the COVID-economic crisis, in which the trio of filmmaker-comedians found a gesture in the illustrating prices - to know the cost of things and to know how prices go up, thanks to inflation that depreciated the Argentinean pesos "by 60% compared to the U.S. dollar" in just one year, according to A.P. News, but which the filmmakers saw, through the mind of a child, as a deranged fiction. [5] How do we even begin to describe such a world? It is through knowing the prices that Cleo creates fiction by reassessing the value of everything, making movements out of furniture or collectibles. At this year's New York Film Festival, Moreno, who filmed and edited The Delinquents over five years, acknowledges this crisis, stating, "It wouldn't have made sense in Argentina to steal pesos because they're very worthless." [6] Morán stole dollars, and these filmmakers knew the price for their cinema.

References:

1. Rivette, Jacques; Helene Frappat. "Secrets and Laws: Interview with Jacques Rivette", trans. from French by Srikanth Srinivasan. The Seventh Art. https://theseventhart.info/2021/03/01/secrets-and-laws-interview-with-jacques-rivette/

2. Zelarayán, Ricardo. The Great Salt Flats / La Gran Salina, trans. from Spanish by Leo Boix. Asymptote Journal. https://www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/ricardo-zelarayan-the-great-salt-flats/

3. Leatherbarrow, W.J. "Introduction to A Gentle Creature and Other Stories by Fyodor Dostoevsky." Oxford World’s Classics. Pg. xi.

4. Daney, Serge. "Cinéma, vie et solitude", trans. by the author, Trafic n° 3, Summer 1992.

5. Calatrava, Almudena. "Paintings on pesos illustrate Argentina’s currency and inflation woes," A.P. News, September 14, 2023. https://apnews.com/article/argentina-money-art-inflation-bills-69a505d4f72c440a4bdd2e756e2d2d38

6. "Rodrigo Moreno on The Delinquents, Duality, and Quietness | NYFF61," posted by Films at Lincoln Center, YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7V9gECI175M

written by TWY