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 this is what I said, out loud, in the course of this deeply strange, utterly distinctive, beguiling and fantastical shaggy-dog story about a bank robbery in Buenos Aires, from Argentinian director Rodrigo Moreno. If Pedro Almodóvar and Eric Rohmer teamed up to compose a meanderingly long heist movie it might look like this, but something in the film’s waywardness makes it very difficult to fit into the heist genre – or any genre.
The scene is a bank in the city, where Moran (Daniel Elías) has been joylessly working for years as a cashier; his long service and palpable dullness mean that he is entrusted with carrying large amounts from the tills to the safe. But Moran has worked out that he can with relative ease transfer sizeable sums into the strongboxes stored in cabinets behind the customer area, and from there into a humble backpack to take them home with him. Moran arranges to meet his similarly boring colleague Román (Esteban Bigliardi) for a drink in a bar and calmly makes him an offer, dumping a backpack bulging with cash at his feet: he will turn himself in to a police station, confess and do what he calculates will be a modest stretch of three-and-a-half years, while Román looks after the money. Afterwards, they will split the cash, enough to retire and quit the rat race. But if Román snitches, Moran tells him, he will tell the authorities they were in it together. Astonished, Román feels he has no choice but to take the bag of money home and hide it in the modest flat he shares with his music-teacher girlfriend, and begin his new secret life of crime.
