Nine Queens

If you've seen David Mamet's House Of Games (1987), you'll recognize that Fabian Bielinsky's film owes much to it.  That's not a bad thing and Nine Queens, with its plot convolutions involving a lock, stock and barrel-full of shady characters all very ready to shaft each other is well-made and well-played .

Juan (Gastón Pauls) is a petty grifter who is plucked from a bungled con by Marcos (Ricardo Darín) who turns out to be a more  experienced swindler. Marcos feels some kind of sympathy for the young man and invites him to be his partner and the pair end up trying to sell a sheet of forged stamps, the Nine Queens of the title, to a dodgy stamp collector (Ignasi Abadal).

The clever plotting holds your attention as you try to work out just where the sting really is but working against your enjoyment is the fact the once the veil is pulled away as you know it must be, you can't help but feel more than a little duped yourself.  Mamet's film worked so well because everything that happened had plausibility. The skill of the sting was working within those constraints. Here, writer/director Bielinsky simply arranges the facts to pull off his fiction.

Thus, the opening scene, which sets up the plot dynamic, conjoins the two principals but so many coincidences (or contrivances) are needed to be satisfied that only the Divine Architect could have arranged them, let alone do something similar again and again, as this film requires, to pull off its tricks. The question mark that  hangs over proceedings is who is doing what to whom. But here, Bielinsky throws out quite a few false scents to make sure that the audience doesn't guess too early what's going on. Once again, there's just alittle too much ex machina manipulation going on.

Nine Queens gives us the gratification of watching swindlers in action from the comfort of our armchairs but at the end of the day it is us whose pockets are emptied.   

DVD Extras: All of a promotional nature, include a making-of featurette, international trailers & TV spots and image gallery.

Available from: Madman

 

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