"Nueve Reinas" / Nine Queens
The story centers on two con artists who meet and decide to cooperate in a major scam. The film was nominated for 28 awards and won 21 of them, and is now considered a classic in the country's film history.
PLOT
The film opens at a convenience store early in the morning. Juan, a con artist, successfully scams the cashier, but later messes up by attempting the same scam again on the next shift. Marcos, who has been observing the whole time, steps in pretending to be a police officer and takes Juan away. As soon as they are far enough from the shop, Marcos tells Juan he is not actually a cop but a fellow con man. Juan asks Marcos to show him the ropes, because his father, also a con man, is in jail and he needs to raise money quickly to bribe a judge to reduce his father's sentence from 10 years to 6 months.
Then a rare scheme seemingly falls into their laps: Sandler, a former business associate of Marcos, needs his help to sell counterfeit copies he made of some rare stamps called "The Nine Queens". The potential mark is Gandolfo, a rich Spaniard who is facing deportation and desperate to smuggle his wealth out of the country. He has no time to fully check if the stamps are authentic but he hires an expert to do a quick check and is satisfied. He offers $450,000 for the stamps, the exchange to take place that evening. In the intervening time, a number of things go wrong. The stamp expert demands a cut, as he knew the stamps were in fact forged. The fake stamps are then stolen out of Juan and Marcos' hands by crooks on motorcycles who, unaware of their value, destroy them by tossing them into a river.
To salvage the scheme, Marcos approaches Sandler's widowed sister, the owner of the real stamps, who agrees to sell them for $250,000. Marcos can put up $200,000 and asks Juan to contribute the remaining $50,000. Juan suspects that he is being scammed, as it's a remarkable coincidence that Marcos needs just the amount that Juan has saved up; but as the $50,000 is not enough to help his father, he reluctantly agrees. They buy the real stamps and go to Gandolfo's hotel, but he says he has changed his mind and will now only buy the stamps if he also gets to sleep with Marcos' sister Valeria, a hotel employee. Valeria's price is that Marcos must confess to their younger brother how he cheated him out of an inheritance. Gandolfo pays for the stamps with a certified check, but the bank crashes the next day, making the check worthless.
It appears that Juan and Marcos are both ruined, but the final scene is a surprise ending. Juan goes to a warehouse, where he greets the motorcycle thieves, Sandler and his sister, Gandolfo, and Juan's fiancée Valeria — revealing that the real scam was to swindle Marcos out of $200,000 as revenge for all the times he cheated his family and his partners.
...
Two small-time swindlers meet, seemingly by chance, in a Buenos Aires convenience store. They agree to team up for the day, with the more experienced Marcos (Darín) offering to teach the younger Juan (Pauls) the tricks of their trade.
And then an opportunity to pull a major-league scam lands in their laps.
An expert forger contacts Marcos about a set of rare stamps from Weimar Germany - the 'Nine Queens' of the title.
A prospective buyer, Gandolfo (Abadal), is being extradited to Venezuela, and in his rush to complete a deal, he may not detect a set of forgeries.
There's a snag, though - he's staying at the hotel where Valeria (Brédice) works, and she hasn't forgiven brother Marcos for the way he attempted to cheat her and her younger sibling out of the family inheritance...
Cinema has always been well-suited to con-artist movies, perhaps because the medium itself is based on illusion, deception, and directorial sleight of hand.
Fabián Bielinsky's fast-moving "Nine Queens" - a huge hit in its native Argentina - is a welcome addition to the genre, comparing favourably to the likes of Stephen Frears' "The Grifters" and David Mamet's "House of Games".
The less the filmgoer knows about the narrative's twists and turns, the better - except to remember that nothing and nobody is quite what they seem.
Alongside the quicksilver performances of Darín and Pauls, and a number of sly supporting cameos, the real-life urban locations furnish "Nine Queens" with an immediacy and authenticity: we're left with a sense of a bustling modern city, awash with hustlers and thieves, pickpockets and swindlers, all taking advantage of the anonymity of the crowd.
Moreover, recent events in Argentina - specifically, the disintegration of the national economy, destroying the savings of millions - have given this taut thriller a powerful allegorical resonance.
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