Nine Queens (2000)

Original title: Nueve reinas

Warning: there will be vague structural spoilers!

When a very basic con goes wrong for him, rookie conman Juan (Gastón Paul) finds himself rescued by the much more experienced crook Marcos (Ricardo Darín). It’s something of a fortunate encounter for both of them. Marcos’s last partner has disappeared on him, and since he’s used to working with a partner, meeting Juan looks like a bit of a godsend to him, or at least that’s what he says. Juan for his part has learned all of the basic cons from his father when he was a child, and is now trying to steal together enough money to help his old man out of a difficult situation; so having someone showing him the ropes should come in very useful indeed. Juan also has a conscience, though, and doesn’t really feel inclined to robbing little old ladies and clerks, as he’s just learning about himself.

Marcos till manages to talk Juan into partnering up with him for at least a day – perhaps he’ll find things more to his taste than he just now believes. As luck will have it, the two stumble upon the chance for a rather bigger deal, an opportunity to sell a fake sheet of stamps to a collector just about to be thrown out of the country. Of course, things and plans become rather complicated from here on out; and Marcos might not be the best guy to partner up with, what with his habit of screwing over his colleagues as well as his own family.

The is the first of only two feature films Argentinean director Fabián Bielinsky made in his short lifetime, and it’s about as brilliant a movie about cons and conmen as you can imagine. There is, apparently, a US remake of the film under the highly original title of Criminal, but I simply can’t find anything about the original that needed to be changed or improved.

As a con movie, this is about as perfectly structured and told a film as I can imagine – every single scene bears the full weight of what is happening on the surface, of what the audience might suspect is actually happening, and of the true story. Bielinsky (who also wrote the script) is playing fair with the audience throughout, certainly not showing certain things that happened before the action starts for us, but delivering all the pieces needed to read the film; he’s just also wonderful at doing this in a perfectly ambiguous way that really makes the viewer want to figure out where this is going, telling and showing how untrustworthy everyone and everything in its world is, and then having its fun with the paranoid mindset this engenders in an audience.

In an uncommon move for much of the subgenre (well, there are some Mamet films with a comparable feel, I suppose), Nine Queens presents its perfectly timed twists and turns without getting showy on its audience. The film’s presentation lacks the smug grand gestures of, say, a Soderbergh Ocean’s Whatever joint, instead aiming for wryness and the knowing nod. Even the final reveal is comparatively underplayed. The film’s kind of stage magic is more akin to a close up card trick than letting the Statue of Liberty disappear behind dry ice fog and special effects. That doesn’t mean the film’s afraid of getting clever on its audience – it’s just not interested in doing so via cheap tricks. Bielinsky – through camera work, editing, and so on – lends the film a great sense of flow, leading viewer and characters through plot and counterplot with elegance and energy, while always finding the most important glance and gesture to anchor each and every scene.

Fascinatingly for a film in which people are incessantly lying about themselves and to each other, Nine Queens isn’t just about moving its plot through twists but also works as an incisive view into its characters, clearly working from the basis that the lies somebody tells may be just as revealing about what they are about as the truth, and so it explores the personalities of its leads through their lies and their truths (with the audience not necessarily in the know about which is which). Because the film is as genuinely well written as it is, this works wonderfully throughout. It’s not only the writing, Pauls and Darín (who is quite the big name in Argentinean movies) are carrying a lot of the film’s weight there too, using a naturalistic acting approach in a genre that tends to the stylized (often for good reasons), managing to help create truthful feeling characters in a field of lies.

Speaking of lies, it is perfectly possible to read the film as a meditation about lies and personal ethics, the difference between personal ethics and morals, and the way people (even those that aren’t in the con business) can start to believe their own lies, even when they are told by others.

Or you could just watch Nine Queens as one of the best films about conmen ever made.