Cat and mouse, the shell game, the scam, the con: Nine Queens is a Sting-like proposition about street swindlers that is wonderfully well-written and executed.
In Nine Queens, two con artists meet over a petty scam in a convenience store. Juan (Gaston Pauls) is the younger and calmer of the two men, but Marcos (Ricardo Darin) is a far more experienced grifter. They agree to team up for a day. After each man has demonstrated his various skills in small swindles, the two men find themselves in the middle of an amazing, half-million dollar opportunity.
It seems there is a set of very rare stamps called the Nine Queens. It seems there may be a way of forging them, too. Into the tale walks one crooked character after another, and seemingly all are adept at lying, stealing and manipulating. The original scheme hatched by our two heroes undergoes change after change as the plot twists and turns and twists again.
Who can be trusted, exactly?
Nine Queens is a beautifully paced set-up, with enough going on around the main narrative to make all the characters three-dimensional. The film has no violence -- this is all about suspicion, psychological tricks, trust and cunning.
With several very good laughs.
The script is so well-written that the names David Mamet and Alfred Hitchcock are already being thrown around for reasons of favourable comparison. Nine Queens has also already won a boatload of awards, winning just about everything at the Argentine Film Critics Awards as well as the Museum of Modern Art's New Directors/New Films award of last year and an MTV Argentina People's Choice Award.
This is -- obviously -- an Argentinian film. On top of all the other swindles going on in Nine Queens, the swindle that is Argentina's economic disaster is always in play.
Nine Queens is a debut movie from writer/director Fabian Bielinsky. The film is in Spanish with English subtitles. We wish to remind you that Nine Queens is exactly the sort of film Hollywood is always re-making and utterly ruining in the process. See it in this incarnation.
(This film is rated PG)
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