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MovieMail's Review
A day in the life of two Argentinian con men: fresh-faced Juan (Gaston
Pauls) is taken under the wing of the more experienced Marcos (Ricardo
Darin), and they stumble into a scam selling forged Weimar Republic stamps
(the Nine Queens of the title) to a shady Spanish businessman staying at the
plush hotel where Marcos’s estranged sister Valencia (Letitia Bredice)
works.
The opening thirty minutes of Fabian Bielinsky’s film serve as a compendium
of contemporary (and very workable) tricks and set-ups. The Sting famously
did much the same thing, but its con-tricks on 1930s racketeers won’t have
been much help to audiences in the 1970s. Should, however, you ever want to
get yourself a free newspaper, or cash from rich widows, Nine Queens’ first
half-hour alone could be considered invaluable.
The remainder is an enjoyably tricksy thriller in the style of a recent
David Mamet, with some of the magician (or stage director)’s flamboyant
showmanship replaced with a little noise and bustle and grit. Naturally, the
plot revolves around one massive piece of misdirection designed to make the
viewer as much of a stooge as any of the characters in the film, but the
plotting would be satisfying enough without the aid of a last-reel twist.
Bielinsky here does for Buenos Aires what Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu did
for Mexico City in Amores Perros, his restless camera taking us from the
seedy bars and clubs of the Argentinian underground to pristine corporate
washrooms and anonymous hotel suites, painting a lightly satirical portrait
of a society corrupt from top to bottom.
Set in Buenos Aires over the course of 24 hours, this is a taut heist thriller in which nothing is what it seems and no one can be trusted. A naive young con artist teams up with an experienced master criminal for what could be the crime to end all crimes.
