Thieves (Ladrones)
Romance and rebellion tango in this 2007 Spanish film, screening at La Mirada in Melbourne, in 2008.
A foreboding movement from Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs sets the scene, under the credits of Ladrones (Thieves), during which we see a young Romanian gypsy boy with his mother, cruising trains for targets to pickpocket.
Cut to several years hence, and the boy, who has spent the intervening years institutionalised and separated from his mother, has managed to track her down to a shabby rooming house. However, behind on her rent, she has fled. Will she return? Will he be reconciled with her? Can he handle what he finds out about her, and himself along the way?
His mother has taught him well: he’s wiley and can take care of himself. But his thieving ways have become habitual to the point of compulsion, and he appears to have no normal attachments to other people. Indeed, his connection with a young college student is brought about by petty crime.
So begins a relationship in which the two engage in crime. His teaching her, is his way of seducing her, presumably because he’s had little in the way of induction into the normal ways of forging relationships with others.
This film has been described as a crime genre film, which is quite inaccurate, in this viewer’s opinion. The criminal folie a deux is a theme that has been explored in more gritty detail in films such as Kalifornia, Bonnie and Clyde and Terrence Malick’s unsettling but brilliant Badlands. By comparison, Ladrones is a pretty, poetic and romantic depiction, perhaps because the crimes are relatively mild.
Crime is what brings the two main characters together, and provides the basis upon which their relationship develops. That we don’t discover the young man’s name, suggests that this is an exploration of identity and belonging. That may be so, though as such, it’s not entirely convincing.
Unravel the plot device, and this film turns out to be mostly an adolescent romance. A very pleasant one, though, provided you don’t expect the film to be as edgy as the opening credits suggest. And if the film is supposed to address the themes of identity and belonging, then perhaps it’s fitting that it uses romance as its vehicle, for isn’t that what helps adolescents discover just who they are?