| Nine Queens | |
|---|---|
Theatrical release poster |
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| Directed by | Fabián Bielinsky |
| Produced by | Cecilia Bossi Pablo Bossi |
| Written by | Fabián Bielinsky |
| Starring | Gastón Pauls Ricardo Darín Leticia Brédice Tomás Fonzi |
| Music by | César Lerner |
| Cinematography | Marcelo Camorino |
| Editing by | Sergio Zottola |
| Distributed by | Buena Vista International |
| Release date(s) | August 31, 2000 |
| Running time | 114 minutes |
| Country | Argentina |
| Language | Spanish |
| Budget | $1,500,000 estimated. |
| Box office | $12,413,888 [1] |
Nine Queens (Spanish: Nueve Reinas) (2000) is an Argentine crime drama film written and directed by Fabián Bielinsky. The picture features Gastón Pauls, Ricardo Darín, Leticia Brédice, and Tomás Fonzi, among others.[2]
The film was nominated for 28 awards and won 21 of them.
It tells the story of two con artists who meet, apparently randomly, and decide to cooperate in a scam.
Contents |
The film opens at a convenience store early in the morning. Juan, a con artist, successfully scams the cashier, but later messes up by attempting the same scam again on the next shift. Marcos, who has been observing the whole time, steps in pretending to be a police officer and takes Juan away. As soon as they are far enough from the shop, Marcos tells Juan he is not actually a cop but a fellow con man. Juan asks Marcos to show him the ropes, because his father, also a con man, is in jail and he needs to raise money to bribe the judge to reduce his father's sentence to six months from ten years.
Then a rare scheme seemingly falls into their laps: a former business associate of Marcos convinces them to sell counterfeit copies he made of some rare stamps called "The Nine Queens". The potential mark is Gandolfo, a rich Spaniard who is facing deportation and desperate to smuggle his wealth out of the country. He is unable to fully check if the stamps are authentic but he hires an expert to do a quick check and is satisfied. He offers them $450,000 for the stamps, the exchange to take place that evening. In the intervening time, a number of things go wrong. The stamp expert demands a cut, as he knew the stamps were in fact forged. The fake stamps are then stolen out of Juan and Marcos' hands by crooks on a motorcycle who are unaware of their value, destroying them by tossing them into a river.
To salvage the scheme, Juan and Marcos see if they can buy the real stamps from their owner, a widow whom they convince to sell the stamps for $250,000. If they can raise the cash, they figure they can still make a $200,000 profit. Juan initially backs out as he is hesitant to trust Marcos with his money, but at the end of the day he kicks in $50,000 on top of Marcos' $200,000 and they buy the real stamps. That night they go to the buyer's hotel, but he says he has changed his mind and will now only buy the stamps if he also gets to sleep with Marcos' sister, a hotel employee. Marcos convinces his sister Valeria to sleep with the buyer, but in exchange she makes him admit to his younger brother how he swindled him out of his inheritance. The buyer of the stamps pays with a certified check, but the bank crashes the next day, making the check worthless.
It appears that Juan and Marcos are both ruined, but the final scene is a surprise ending. Juan heads back to his warehouse, where he joins everyone except Marcos who was involved in the stamp transaction, relaxing after a successful heist. The entire time, the real scam was to screw Marcos out of $200,000 as revenge for all the times he swindled his family and his partners, and Juan was actually engaged to Valeria, to whom he showed signs of affection throughout the film.
The main character of the film is trying to remember the tune of a Rita Pavone song throughout the film. The song by Rita Pavone "Il Ballo Del Mattone" plays as the credits run.
The film opened wide in Argentina on August 31, 2000. The film was screened at various film festivals, including: the Telluride Film Festival, USA; the Toronto Film Festival, Canada; the Medellín de Película, Colombia; the Portland International Film Festival, United States; the Cognac Festival du Film Policier, France; the München Fantasy Filmfest, Germany; the Norwegian International Film Festival, Norway; and others.
In the United States it opened on a limited basis on April 19, 2002.
The film's screenplay was adapted in the 2004 film Criminal. It was also used as a basis for the following Indian films: the Bollywood film Bluffmaster! (2005) and the Malayalam film Gulumal (2009).
Film critic Roger Ebert liked the screenplay of the film, and wrote, "And on and on, around and around, in an elegant and sly deadpan comedy. A plot, however clever, is only the clockwork; what matters is what kind of time a movie tells. Nine Queens is blessed with a gallery of well-drawn character roles, including the alcoholic mark and his two bodyguards; the avaricious widow who owns the "nine queens" and her much younger bleached-blond boyfriend, and Valeria the sister, who opposes Marcos' seamy friends and life of crime but might be willing to sleep with Gandolfo if she can share in the spoils."[3]
The San Francisco Chronicle film critic, Edward Guthmann, also reviewed the film positively and thought the actors performed quite well, writing, "Fast-paced and unerringly surprising, Nine Queens is nicely performed by a large cast, particularly Darín (El hijo de la novia) as a goateed, less-than- perfect hoodwinker. David Mamet plowed this con-the-con turf in Heist, House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner, but Bielinsky, in his directing debut, makes it seem sassy and reinvented."[4]
Wins
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