Juan (Gastón Pauls) is a small time conman who today is in a convenience store trying the old trick of managing to get far more change than he is owed, and it goes so well that when he sees the woman behind the counter is leaving her shift to be replaced by another, he picks up some more items and tries the trick again. But this time he is rumbled, and the manager is about to call the police when there is a shout and the only other customer in the shop has pulled a gun. He claims to be a cop, and escorts Juan from the premises, but he's not involved with the law - quite the opposite, in fact...
One of the number of Argentine films to be awarded international attention in the early twenty-first century, Nine Queens, or Nueve reinas as it was originally known, was a twisty-turny conman thriller along the lines of The Sting, only here such was the atmosphere of someone pulling the wool over someone else's eyes that you found yourself attempting to second guess the plot all the way through. You know some kind of trick is being perpetrated, yet you're not sure if it's on yourself as a viewer or on one of the characters in the film.
Juan seems to be the main target here, so much so that even he is deeply suspicious of his new friend Marcos (respected Argentine thesp Ricardo Darín) who has latched onto him after saving him from arrest. At first, he asks him to help out with his low-key cons, such as taking money from a little old lady or a cafe with such obvious scams that you wonder how they could ever pull them off and not get caught. But then a bigger fish swims into their net when Marcos meets Sandler (Oscar Nuñez), a dying forger who has access to a sheet of the nine stamps of the title, something which could make all three of them a lot of money.
Sandler claims to have known Juan's father, also a conman who the young man later goes to meet in prison, a reminder of how he could easily end up if he's not careful, but is Sandler actually telling the truth or is Marcos trying to coax him into a set-up that will cost him more than a few years behind bars? All the way through the characters demonstrate either Richard Nixon-style levels of denial by telling others they are not crooks, or are outright liars as just about every actor with a speaking role seems to have some ulterior motive or are planning a way of fooling someone else, and only so many of them are aware of this.
It's the ones who have a handle on the duplicity of their fellow con artists who will manage to succeed, and in truth the ending, which is a well-hidden outcome, is frankly unbelievable, involving as it does a con of hard to accept proportions that must have relied heavily on chance - either that or knowing how the victim would behave inside out. Yet that is part of the fun, and you can enjoy being tricked by a film in the same way you can appreciate being fooled by a magic act: Nine Queens runs along similar lines. Needless to say the less you know about the plot of this the better it will work on you, and the cast are impeccable about not allowing even the slyest of winks to the audience. A good show all round, then, although a second viewing might expose the implausibilities. Remade in Hollywood as Criminal. Music by Cesar Lemer.
