Twenty-five years ago, Argentinian director Fabi\u00e1n 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s financial shady dealers in a deregulated banking system that crashed soon after the film came out. Ricardo Dar\u00edn 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 (Gast\u00f3n Pauls) incompetently trying to pull off a petty scam whereby the cashier is bamboozled into giving him too much change. (It\u2019s a cheap trick to compare with that of Tatum O\u2019Neal in Peter Bogdanovich\u2019s Paper Moon or John Cusack in Stephen Frears\u2019 The Grifters.)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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 \u201cNine Queens\u201d to a crooked businessman with a passion for philately. Juan is saucer-eyed at the thought of so much easy money. But what\u2019s the catch?<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019t believe you deserve luck?<\/p>\n