Nine Queens
This Magic Moment
There is a moment in every David Mamet movie (and Nine Queens, despite its Argentinian accent, is very much a David Mamet movie) where things just click. In House of Games, it is the moment just after Joe Mantegna loses his briefcase. In State and Main, it is the moment when Philip Seymour Hoffman walks into the courtroom for the second time. In The Spanish Prisoner, it is the moment when the police remind Campbell Scott about that numbered Swiss bank account. In Glengarry Glen Ross, it is the moment when Jack Lemmon realizes the truth about his latest customers. In Heist, it is the moment when Gene Hackman goes to the stranded plane on the airport runway the second time. These are the moments when the curtain is revealed, when the con is exposed, when the audience (if they have been paying attention) is let in on the trick.
Nine Queens borrows this device, and does it one better. The con men here are Juan and Marco, two small-time grifters who get involved in a risky scheme involving a special issue of nine stamps (the Nine Queens of the title). One of them makes a suggestion to the other involving a very specific sum of money — as it happens, a direct reference to one of the movies listed above. However, unlike most marks or supposed marks, the other man knows a con when he hears one, and is immediately suspicious. For the first time, we have a character in a David Mamet movie who acts as if he has seen a David Mamet movie before.
The fun of the Mamet movie — the Mamet genre, we now can say — is that it rewards the intelligent viewer. You are almost invariably dealing with a set of very smart characters, but the audience is expected to be smarter, to figure out things before the characters do, the better to understand their situation, and ultimately, their plight. The less-intelligent members of the audience are not following so closely and are frequently baffled and frustrated by the structure of the plot and the motives of the characters. For better or for worse, this means that the Mamet movie has a smaller audience, almost a cult following, but that the movies are invariably more interesting and worthwhile than the filler thrown out by Hollywood on a weekly basis.
Nine Queens is at least the second movie in recent years to wholly embrace the Mamet style without actually having the master’s involvement. (The other is the unjustly ignored Boiler Room, and there may be others to come.) As stated, it is from Argentina, of all the unlikely places. (The movie begins in an Exxon/Esso convenience store that is as American as Cheez Doodles, and most of the action takes place in a Hilton in Buenos Aires that could just have easily been in Boston or Belgium or Bahrain.) It is directed by first-time helmer Fabián Bielinsky, who wrote the brilliant, twisty script.
It features Gastón Pauls as Juan, the apprentice con man, seen first trying to scam a cashier out of a good-sized chunk of change. (The movie is set after the “dollarization” of the Argentinian peso but (just) before the current collapse of the Argentine economy.) Nine Queens does not describe how this particular con game works, but leaves it as an exercise for the viewer. (When the amount that is stolen is revealed, it is relatively easy to go through the steps and figure out how the trick works.) Unfortunately, Pauls tries the trick twice in succession, and is nabbed by Ricardo Darín as Marco, who claims to be an undercover cop at first but soon reveals himself to be a fellow con artist. The two men agree to a temporary partnership, just for the day, with Marco teaching Juan some of the advanced tricks of the trade.
More than this, I cannot reveal in good conscience. Nor does it matter much, because anything I could reveal would not necessarily be helpful to you in interpreting the twisty, meandering plot. Suffice it to say that Nine Queens has all the necessary elements for the success of the Mamet movie. It’s a dark, gritty film, accentuated here by the moody handheld camerawork. Its plot is simple enough, but involves wheels within wheels that the audience must puzzle out. It features a female romantic interest (Leticia Brédice) who may or may not be everything that she seems. Most importantly, it features amazingly good acting by all involved, especially Darín, who has a career all cut out for him as a smooth-talking villain in Hollywood if he so wishes. Most importantly, it has more than one of those Mamet magic moments where the whole world wobbles on its axis, revealing the shape of the con and the nature of the characters, and is in this way as satisfying as any other of Mamet’s films.
Nine Queens swept the Argentinian film awards, and deservedly so. It got only a limited release in the U.S. — in fact, it’s no longer playing here in Atlanta. It is a must-see for the David Mamet enthusiast and for anyone who appreciates intelligent, stylish moviemaking.