IT'S A veritable Ricardo Darin-o-rama these days, with the heretofore unknown Argentine actor appearing simultaneously in two top-notch films: the Academy Award-nominated "Son of the Bride," which opened two weeks ago, and now "Nine Queens," a wickedly clever drama about a pair of cagey confidence artists.
A winner of seven Argentinean Film Critics Association Awards (including Best Picture, Best Director for Fabian Bielinsky and Best Actor for Darin), "Nine Queens" is by no means a one-man show, however. Playing an experienced Buenos Aires scam artist named Marcos, Darin shares the limelight with Gaston Pauls in the role of a younger, less-seasoned and, up until now, smaller-time grifter named Juan.
Ricardo Darin and Gaston Pauls star in "Nine Queens."
(Sony Pictures Classics)
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As the film opens, Marcos watches Juan carry off a perfectly executed but ultimately Mickey-Mouse bill-changing swindle in a convenience store, only to step in and pretend to arrest him when the overeager Juan gets caught by the manager trying to pull off the same trick twice. After Marcos drags Juan outside to safety, revealing the plastic squirt gun he had tucked into his waistband for effect back at the store, Marcos promptly proposes that the two team up. The older man, as it happens, has recently lost his partner, and he also thinks he can teach the kid a move or two.
As he's soon to learn, the neophyte could have a lesson for the master as well.
After part of a day spent ripping people off for small change – sometimes singly, sometimes in tandem, and all the while sizing up each other's strengths and weaknesses – Marcos chances upon a former colleague named Sandler (Oscar Nuñez), a once-expert forger and now sick old man who tells the pair about a counterfeit sheet of rare and expensive postage stamps he has made, called the Nine Queens.
Marcos and Juan quickly realize that this could be the Big One and undertake to sell the fakes for what they think is serious money. How much more serious the money is than even they know becomes apparent as they wade into waters that rapidly rush over their heads, calling for both men's most agile improvisational skills to extricate themselves from one swamping wave after another.
As the stakes and danger – both physical and emotional – increase, Bielinsky keeps the audience rapt but off balance. Marcos, it comes out, has some ugly history with his sister (Leticia Bredice), a concierge who works in the hotel where their potential victim is staying, while Juan's motivation (he's driven by the goal of helping his imprisoned father) seems to occasionally cloud his judgment.
Like Marcos and Juan, the audience never really knows who's scamming whom in this beguiling game of cat and cat, until the very end. Blackly cynical and highly watchable, "Nine Queens" is a tale of honor – and a kind of sick justice – among thieves.
NINE QUEENS (R, 115 minutes) – Contains profanity, roughhousing and sexual themes. At Landmark Theatres Bethesda Row Cinema and Cineplex Odeon Dupont Circle 5.
