Sat Mar 2 — 1:30 pm

3hr 9min
Comedy / Drama

Preceded by:
Canada Vignettes: Bill Miner

The Delinquents is a deliciously bizarre existential heist movie that wants you to steal back your life. Like its characters, Moreno’s banally surreal, big-little movie eschews the safe old daily grind in favor of the perilous unknown, and so, in a uniquely pleasurable way, reminds us that we too have options: Choose work, or choose the whole wide, weird world instead. This ticklish saga follows the loose-limbed, gently surreal journeys of two colleagues who collude in robbing the bank where they work.

Three hours long and divided into two parts, it starts off as a leisurely, shaggy dog crime story, with what’s probably one of the most laid-back bank robberies in film history. But then it digresses, deepens and complexifies, creating new mysteries out of old ones, and love affairs out of the thin air, into a twisty heist movie unlike any you’ve ever seen. Very few films make you ask “what just happened?” at the end – and also in fact “what is happening right now?” at various points during the running time. But during this deeply strange, utterly distinctive, beguiling and fantastical story, and just when you think you know for sure where this film is going, it pulls the rug out from under you and leaves you pondering more expansive questions.

The film shows us that bank employees, like all the other human beings we meet briefly and incuriously, have vivid and intense inner lives, just like everyone else, and a capacity for poetically rewriting their own identities.  Breaking through the genre wall, The Delinquents is an astute existential heist movie that will reward patient viewers with a humorous fable about freedom. Over the course of its droll, indefinably strange three hours, it may well persuade you that the crazy thing is not to break from your normal routine.