FilmBlather.com

Fabian Bielinsky's Nine Queens runs an hour and fifty-five minutes, but might as well be a Seinfeld episode: so engaging, so entertaining is this Mametian feast of con games and double-triple-quadruple crossings that the subtitles seem to disappear and the reel change marks may as well not exist. Yes, on reflection it is probably true that this is little more than House of Games-lite (or Spanish Prisoner-lite), but it stands on its own, being tighter, more visceral than anything Mamet has done with the genre. With a plot that's twistier than The Usual Suspects and an inevitably arbitrary resolution, this isn't a movie you watch to figure out the mystery, but to have the floor pulled out from under you time and again.

The events of the film take place over the course of a day, which begins with young, small-time conman Juan (Gaston Pauls) entering a convenience store and stupidly attempting to pull the same change scam on two different cash register clerks, one after another. He is then dragged off by another customer claiming to be a policeman, though it turns out that he has just played a con of his own and pocketed the money Juan attempted to take from the store. This is Marcos (Ricardo Darin), a more experienced confidence game player who offers to spend a day working with neophyte Juan, make some money and teach him a few things.

It isn't long before a more significant opportunity presents itself: Marcos has a friend who is an expert forger, and he has made a carbon copy of an insanely valuable set of rare stamps called the "Nine Queens." There just happens to be a wealthy stamp collector staying at a local hotel who must leave the country early the next morning, leaving him no time for a lab to test the specimen's integrity; if Juan and Marcos can convince him to purchase the stamps, they will both become significantly richer.

Nine Queens has an easygoing, breezy, episodic pace and style perhaps more suited to some Reese Witherspoon romantic comedy, but that turn out to be appropriate to the quintessentially cinematic story in play here. Bielinsky makes no attempt at naturalism, and it is clear that these characters exist in their own world in which our standards of verisimilitude don't necessarily apply. From frame one, we realize that we are being manipulated: much like David Fincher's The Game, this one never bothers to explain its many outrageous coincidences and impossibly calculated events, but it doesn't much matter. That we are asked to take certain things for granted is hardly unreasonable in a movie like this.

For a while, I tried to keep a step ahead of the movie, trying to figure out who is scamming whom. After about 45 minutes, I realized that I was engaged in a pointless exercise: there is only two or three ways the movie can possibly go, and which one it is would be arbitrary, since the movie wasn't about to tip its hand in any fair way. So I stopped my foolishness and was surprised by how much I was enjoying the actual story being told, and how much I cared about Juan and Marcos' plot to peddle the phony Nine Queens to an arrogant, unassuming businessman.

I walked out of Nine Queens with a broad grin on my face, not because of the ending, which inevitably twisted everything around and put the plot on its head, but because of what came before. Bielinsky isn't a "sleight-of-hand" filmmaker so much as a gifted storyteller, able to engage, beguile, and make 115 minutes seem like 25.