8 hours ago
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Twenty-five years ago, Argentinian director Fabián Bielinsky gave us this grifter satire classic, a deliciously cynical tale of swindling and double-cross. It is confidence trickery perpetrated on the victim in parallel to narrative trickery perpetrated on the audience, who are invited to assume that however hard the fictional characters on screen are falling, the rug under their own feet is perfectly secure. Four years later, Hollywood paid this excellent film the traditional compliment of a well-meaning but inferior (and now forgotten) remake, pedantically renamed Criminal, starring John C Reilly and Diego Luna.
Now restored and rereleased, the original looks sharper than ever: a drama of squalid fraud which is a tale of human greed, but also a specific, prophetic jab at Argentina’s financial shady dealers in a deregulated banking system that crashed soon after the film came out. Ricardo Darín made an international name for himself in one of the tough-guy everyman roles that was to become his brand. He plays Marcos, a hard-bitten conman browsing in a convenience store one evening, and amused to notice fresh-faced wannabe trickster Juan (Gastón Pauls) incompetently trying to pull off a petty scam whereby the cashier is bamboozled into giving him too much change. (It’s a cheap trick to compare with that of Tatum O’Neal in Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon or John Cusack in Stephen Frears’ The Grifters.)
Marcos saves the hapless young chump from the authorities by frogmarching him out pretending to be a cop and offers to make him his partner in a few deals he’s trying to pull off; Juan agrees, having perhaps rashly told Marcos he has saved $50,000 towards a bribe he intends to pay to a judge to save his career-criminal dad from a lengthy prison sentence. Marcos has a long and elaborate tale to tell of his own dispute with siblings over a family inheritance, and then somehow they get the chance at making a staggering fortune by selling an ultra-rare set of stamps from Weimar Germany called the “Nine Queens” to a crooked businessman with a passion for philately. Juan is saucer-eyed at the thought of so much easy money. But what’s the catch?
The Nine Queens could be a subtextual comment on a certain type of secret postwar expatriate in Argentina, lurking in a concealed network of hush money, resentment and shame. The story has a little of George Roy Hill’s The Sting, but more of the double-dealing bad faith of David Mamet movies such as House of Games; it plays on a particular kind of hard-won cynicism that seems like the truth, but might not be. A fool and his money are soon parted, of course, and if something seems too good to be true, then that’s probably just what it is. But what if the Nine Queens and their promise of an instant jackpot are real, like the once-in-a-lifetime rare buffalo nickel in Mamet’s American Buffalo? What if you passed up your one opportunity of getting rich? Is your cynicism just another kind of self-destructive fakery, an admission that, in your heart, you don’t believe you deserve luck?
This is an outstanding film with an amusing payoff over the final credits – and it is very sad that Bielinsky died of a heart attack just a few years after it came out, having just completed another thriller with Darín called The Aura. A potentially great career cut short.
English (US)