FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE Nine Queens


Nine Queens by Fabian Bielinsky is a con with a con with a con. Whenever we're at the point of believing we solved it, there's a new level. So this is one of those movies in which not only nothing is as it seems - here nothing seems as it seems... It all starts with a seemingly random meeting (apparently in Nine Queens everything is pretty much everything). Juan (Gaston Pauls) changes 20 dollars at a naive cashier and in the end he owns 39 dollars. How, I still haven't understood that. Juan gets greedy after the first time, tries another cashier, but this time he gets blown up: The first cashier screams, the manager is informed, then a stranger, Marcos (Ricardo Darin), pulls out his gun and identifies himself as a policeman. Juan is arrested. Of course, Marcos is only apparently a cop, so he invites Juan for breakfast and tells him about a real "thing". His (seeming) sister Valeria (Leticia Bredice), who (seemingly) works in a hotel, can help them to the Nine Queens, a rare stamp series. The victim: Gandolfo (Ignasi Abadal), (apparently) rich and constantly drunk. At this point it should be said that nothing of the plot is revealed. Every "apparently" is just an "apparently", what means there; it could be like this or not. The plot works cleverly, but is not the main thing! Nine Queens is an elegant comedy, that pretends to be "dead serious". All characters in the movie are carefully worked out and lively. The most beautiful moments are those in which the characters themselves dissolve an "apparent" one and yet everything is completely different again. Besides, Juan falls in love with Valeria and it's also about gangster honor and friendship. Nine Queens plays in Buenos Aires and even the city seems like a fraud: Sometimes you think it is actually a South American metropolis, then again it looks American or European. By the way: I read that Fabian Bielinsky's script was the winner in an Argentine competition. One knows this method from HBO or Miramax and I think that no studio would have been able to create such a story on its own. Anyway, Nine Queens became a huge success in South America and has been an insider tip here for over ten years.