Nine Queens

This week, a movie you might have missed. Today’s film, the Argentine drama from 2000 Nine Queens, was suggested by listener Dave Blaine. Dave described it as a suspenseful crime film about two con men  with a twist at the end that he never saw coming. Descriptions online compared Nine Queens to the work of David Mamet and other tough guy writers and filmmakers whose movies focus on the labor and language of criminals. Between that high praise and the fact that the film stars Ricardo Darin, an Argentine actor who gave a fantastic performance in 2009’s The Secret in Their Eyes, I was intrigued. 

 The story begins with Juan, a small-time grafter bilking a sweet convenience store worker out of a hundred bucks. After he gets greedy and goes back to do the same thing to a different worker in the same store, he gets busted. Unfortunately for Juan, an undercover cop happens to be on the scene and drags him out of the store, assuring the workers that he’ll get justice for them. Fortunately for Juan, the guy isn’t a cop at all but instead is a fellow con man named Marcos. Marcos saw a less-experienced colleague in need and decided to intervene. They spend the day together, testing one another’s knowledge, learning each other’s stories. An old colleague of Marcos’s comes along with a potential big money scheme involving a sheet of counterfeit stamps - near perfect copies of a rare, unbroken sheet called the Nine Queens – and Marcos grudgingly agrees to take Juan on as a partner in selling the fakes to a rich businessman who needs to get out of town as soon as possible and needs to put his wealth into something portable.

An added complication arises when it turns out that the businessman is spending his last days in Argentina in an upscale hotel where Marcos’s bitter, estranged sister is a concierge and his adoring, hero-worshiping younger brother is a bellhop. His sister is angry because Marcos did what con men do and bilked her and their younger brother out of inheritance land and money that was rightfully theirs. Marcos just wants the past to be the past and to move on to his next big score.

Roadblock after roadblack appears as, among other things, the fake Nine Queens are first detected as forgeries and then stolen from our con artist protagonists and thrown into a river. The profit margin for Juan and Marcos shrinks as they have to pay off more and more people to overcome the obstacles in their way. In the end, the crooked, departing businessman finds out that the cute concierge at his hotel is Marcos’s sister and insists that she become part of the deal in buying the Nine Queens. One night with her and he’ll happily buy. Needless to say, that conversation between the two siblings doesn’t go well.  

It’s a twisty, turny tale of paranoia and deception galore, and each performance is perfectly modulated, particularly those of the two leads. Gaston Pauls as Juan has an innocent, open face and looks befuddled through most of the movie, making him a highly effective con man and a unpredictable player in this game of who’s fooling who?. The great Ricardo Darin alternates between being persuasive, warm, and charming and then rat-like, cold, and powerfully conniving.  His eyes are constantly watching, assessing, and greedily looking for an angle that will benefit him the best. 

When his sister agrees to sleep with the businessman but only if Marcos confesses what he did with the family inheritance to their innocent younger brother, Darin’s face alone is a masterwork of acting.

Nine Queens is a great con artist film that more than transcends the language barrier. Each character is compelling as they shift between likable and pathetic, relatable and completely inhumane. I’m glad Dave Blaine recommended it, and I’m happy to pass his excellent recommendation on to you.