‘Nine Queens’ Blu-ray (review)

Nine Queens is an Argentinian noir made in 2000.

Directed by the late Fabián Bielinsky with a quick and lively realism on the streets of Buenos Aires, the film shimmers with life, energy, and danger.

It is a fine example of one of the very best sub-genres of the crime film: the long con.

Gastón Pauls plays Juan, an operator working small con games on the streets of Buenos Aires who gets noticed by Marcos (Ricardo Darín), a more experienced con-man who is looking for a partner for a larger score.

An older associate of Marcos, Sandler (Oscar Núñez) has come into possession of a forged set of rare stamps he’s looking to offload to a collector (José Ignacio Abadal) who is about to be deported.

The collector doesn’t have time for a true authentication and relies on an expert who “confirms” the set’s authenticity, before meeting the con-men and demanding a cut.

Now the game is on, and the rest of the film is an escalating series of setups and payoffs teasing the audience at who may really be pulling the strings.

Fabián Bielinsky made only two films before his untimely death but in that short career he showed a laser focus for the rhythm and logic of American crime fiction. Nine Queens feels particularly indebted to the themes of trust and deception in David Mamet’s House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner and visually the early work of Martin Scorsese on Mean Streets.

The camera is lithe, energetic, but not distracting. The photography is seductive in how it draws you into the private world of men playing on trust, on social convention, to work out a living between the lines of society.

The script is very American in that it is more interested in story than character, and it is polished in the way that old Hollywood feels polished– lines uttered in the first fifteen minutes are paid off spectacularly in the final five.

This is not a thriller, which deals with the concerns of the upper classes, this is a noir about working class crooks where everything returns to the dollar, and it looms over all proceedings like Count Dracula.

Pauls and Darín are in an actor’s showcase, and they know it.

The film draws out all the comedy you would expect from two men who have all the angles figured out in how to get honest people to voluntarily cough up their money, and the early levity makes the third act of the picture, where it seems that Juan’s life savings are at stake, all the more shocking because we, the audience, have been seduced by these clever men.

How much more heinous it must be to be actually fooled by them or someone like them in the real world?

After all, a thief takes your money directly, but a con artist offers you money he doesn’t have and waits for you to reciprocate with what you do. A con artist makes you an accessory to your own robbery, and the third act of Nine Queens shifts you from bemused voyeur to paranoid operator as the situations which could be chance or might be set ups, start to pile up and the stakes start to rise.

All of this supports a final twist that echoes films like Fincher’s The Game and makes you want to start the film over again the moment you’ve finished to see how fair the filmmakers were playing with you from the jump.

Like all great cons, you only realize you were fooled five minutes after it’s too late to do a thing about it.

Highly Recommended.