NINE QUEENS (Fabián Bielinsky, 2002) R

Reviewed: May 18, 2002

I'm a total sucker for con men movies (no lame pun intended), so this movie has an immediate head start. There are some sequences early in Nine Queens where a veteran con man is showing a younger con man the ropes -- con after con after con -- and I could watch footage of that nature all day long. To me, con men are inherently such fascinating people, the only criminals whose number one priority is to make you trust them and thus to make you like them, and the only criminal who must make sure they are always smarter than their victims. Think about that. Imagine if every thief or murderer had to make sure they're more intelligent than the people they steal from or kill-- there'd hardly be any crime anymore. I'm of the mind that it's fundamentally impossible to make a boring film about con men, though making a great one's another story.

Nine Queens is one of the best con men flicks I've ever seen. Because David Mamet's been the primary maker of films involving con men over the past few decades, Nine Queens keeps getting called Mametian and at least 95% of Nine Queens' reviews reference Mamet in some capacity (now including, unfortunately, this one too). But the incessant comparisons are a little misleading. Truth be told, Nine Queens didn't remind me much of Mamet at all. The writing's real, not stylized. The plot doesn't move along at quite the same clip a Mamet plot usually does (although it's definitely never slow). And because Nine Queens concentrates on a single relationship between two con men, because it's a day in the life of these two men, it draws a specific relationship with more depth and emotion than any Mamet con men film ever has (not to take away from Mamet; I love House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner and Heist like hell, but deep emotion has never been Mamet's strongest suit). Nine Queens is warmer than a typical Mamet film.

Writer/director Fabián Bielinsky makes his directing debut with Nine Queens, a wonderful achievement considering the assurance and the masterful tricky he injects into every frame. Nine Queens is mostly shot in wide masters with Bielinsky rarely isolating either character in the frame, instead showing how they interact with each other even if it's only an almost imperceptible physical gesture or a shifting gait. Bielinsky's wide shots are also important because they show the con men in their environment and perhaps nothing is more important than the world in which con men operate. Their world is their livelihood. The two leads of Nine Queens both have expressive faces that say much without any dialogue. The older con man looks tough, grizzled, sharp; the younger con man baby-faced, calm, sleepy-eyed. Pristine casting is crucial because, after all, what are con men but pitch-perfect actors, actors who must be pitch-perfect lest they go to prison.

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of making a con men film is believability then. Most con men films have to con the audience in some capacity so that the amount of trust and faith a movie audience usually must place in a film and the filmmakers are amplified tenfold in con men movie situations. There are inevitably a lot of plot twists layered throughout a con men movie (Nine Queens is no exception), and the audience has to buy each and every one. As far as Nine Queens is concerned I bought every plot occurrence minus one. Percentage-wise, that's pretty excellent. And considering the one plot occurrence I did not buy wasn't that important and could have easily been remedied, I'm not gonna complain. I was duped enough times to be pleased as punch.

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