Very few movies make you ask “what simply occurred?” on the finish – and in addition in actual fact “what is going on proper now?” at numerous factors throughout the working time. However that is what I mentioned, out loud, in the midst of this deeply unusual, completely distinctive, beguiling and fantastical shaggy-dog story a few financial institution theft in Buenos Aires, from Argentinian director Rodrigo Moreno. If Pedro Almodóvar and Eric Rohmer teamed as much as compose a meanderingly lengthy heist film it would appear like this, however one thing within the movie’s waywardness makes it very tough to suit into the heist style – or any style.
The scene is a financial institution within the metropolis, the place Moran (Daniel Elías) has been joylessly working for years as a cashier; his lengthy service and palpable dullness imply that he’s entrusted with carrying giant quantities from the tills to the secure. However Moran has labored out that he can with relative ease switch sizeable sums into the strongboxes saved in cupboards behind the client space, and from there right into a humble backpack to take them house with him. Moran arranges to fulfill his equally boring colleague Román (Esteban Bigliardi) for a drink in a bar and calmly makes him a proposal, dumping a backpack bulging with money at his toes: he’ll flip himself in to a police station, confess and do what he calculates shall be a modest stretch of three-and-a-half years, whereas Román takes care of the cash. Afterwards, they’ll break up the money, sufficient to retire and give up the rat race. But when Román snitches, Moran tells him, he’ll inform the authorities they have been in it collectively. Astonished, Román feels he has no alternative however to take the bag of cash house and conceal it within the modest flat he shares along with his music-teacher girlfriend, and start his new secret lifetime of crime.
However there are different narrative strands, surreally branching and subdividing. Moran and Román (the anagrammatic name-pairing hinting at a parallel universes and coincidences that they don’t even guess at) have a imply boss on the financial institution known as Del Toro, performed by veteran Argentinian actor Germán De Silva; and in jail, Moran is terrorised by a gang boss nicknamed Garrincha, additionally performed by Germán De Silva.
Whereas in jail, Moran tells Román that he in actual fact has additionally hidden some cash close to a stream in distant Alpa Corral in Córdoba province, and Román ought to get it. However the movie loops off right into a pastoral comedy territory when Román is distracted on his harmful mission simply when he must be tensely making his getaway, falling in love with an area lady, Norma (Margarita Molfino), who has a smallholding there and serving to a good friend make a movie within the space. And an outrageous twist is to create one other weird cosmic parallel.
It’s at first attainable to quibble about procedural implausibilities and plot-holes: might a financial institution robber actually matter on such a brief sentence when the cash hadn’t been recovered? Properly, realist worries aren’t precisely the purpose right here. This can be a deadpan comedy which strides off down its personal assured, eccentric path, and truly the entire heist trope is subverted from the outset by the purely un-tense manner the theft is proven. The seriocomic style of this movie needs to be savoured, like some little-known fortified wine, and there’s something so seductive on this unlikely journey. It reveals us that financial institution workers, like all the opposite human beings we meet briefly and incuriously, have vivid and intense internal lives, identical to everybody else, and a capability for poetically rewriting their very own identities. This may very well be a cult basic.
