#13 - Nueve Reinas (2000)

Please, excuse this occasional moment of national pride, since I don't get plenty of them. For a while I had disregarded my country's movies, until an Argentine film won an Academy Award for best foreign picture and... well, I started to pay more attention to homegrown productions (even though most movies produced here are garbage) and I stumbled upon this one a couple of times. I had never fully seen it and now that I have I just have to spread the word. It's so good, that an American version was made (starring John C. Reilly), and even Bollywood made their best attempt to bastardize it. Three times, according to Wikipedia.

Sorry India. I loved Slumdog Millionaire, but the rest of your movie résumé is just... ugh.

The movie is about Juan, a small time crook (Gastón Pauls) who is taken under the wing of Marcos, a professional con artist (Ricardo Darín). After getting acquainted, Marcos gets a "business opportunity" in the form of selling nine very rare stamps to a millionaire Spaniard philatelist (counterfeit, of course). Pretty much the biggest scam of their lives. But that isn't an easy task by any means: everything just keeps fucking up.


Deceit is the biggest theme in the movie, naturally, it is both of the main characters' way of life. And as the plot progresses, both Juan and the audience start to feel skeptical about the situation. Is Marcos just using him in the same way he seems to be using everyone else? The Spaniard, what if he's ripping them off as well?  Most of the characters here ARE con artists, after all, and this is a very big fucking deal with incredibly unreliable people, and even then the film manages to hint these very cleverly. Oh, and the ending is just perfect.

He's probably flipping you the bird with his other hand.

The lead performances are spot-on. Juan is surprisingly relatable despite being a thief, and Marcos is just fantastic: you can't get enough of how cleverly he tricks everyone around him. Even then, the supporting cast is the true strength of the movie. You have Marcos's sister who has had it with his bullshit and tries to keep a distance from him, even when she is involved in the scam indirectly; the Spaniard that even when he's the one that's being fooled, has still the edge on the situation; the owner of the true stamps that is unwilling to give them up... There isn't a single character here that I felt wasn't developed enough or wasn't entertaining to watch.

The biggest issue with this film is the country of origin, though. We are used to, for instance, missing clever wordplays and slang that are lost in translation, incredible voice work that is absent in dubs, and aspects of Western culture we understand after being fed so many American tv shows and movies. I am aware that there are English dubs and subtitles for this movie but even then most the movie's charm and realism is lost when viewed by a non-Argentine.

It's sad that everyone can recognise an activity as intelectually degrading as cheerleading,

but next to no American will ever read Jorge Luis Borges.

But even then, the plot and characters are still good enough to make the movie enjoyable for those unfamiliar with our culture. Just please keep in mind that not every single person in my country is a hustler. Unless you mean our government.