Nine Queens [DVD] [2002] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

DVD ~ Ricardo Darín

NEW SEALED

If David Mamet had been born in Buenos Aires instead of Chicago, Nine Queens is most likely the kind of movie he'd be making. An intricate, playful scam caper, where not only the characters but we the audience are constantly trying to suss out who's screwing whom--and how, and why--it's a movie very much in the Mametian mould. But at the same time the Argentinian setting gives Fabian Bielinsky's debut feature a specifically Latin pungency and the urgent sense of a society teetering over a financial abyss. Which is all the more remarkable since, even though a key plot-point turns on a bank going bust, the movie was made a few months before the Argentinean economy went belly-up.

The intrigue grips from the very outset as Juan, a young con artist, overreaches himself in a grocery store. He's rescued from disaster by Marcos, an older and more experienced grifter, who then takes him on in a master-pupil relationship. When the chance of a major coup involving some rare stamps (the Queens of the title) turns up, the partnership starts coming under strain; can either one really trust the other? And is either who he pretends to be? The plot suffers from a few implausibilities and loose ends, but sustains its momentum beguilingly. Ricardo Darín, as the saturnine Marcos, and Gastón Pauls as the fresh-faced, seemingly ingenuous Juan play off each other beautifully--but the dominant character is the seething, hustling city of Buenos Aires itself, where social mores are fluid and uncertain, and everybody has his eye out for the main chance. This is a society Bielinsky (who also scripted) clearly knows intimately, and like a true con-artist he makes shrewd use of his expertise to keep us guessing right up to the final twist

PLEASE NOTE THIS IS REGION 1 PLEASE MAKE SURE YOU CAN PLAY THIS HAS I CANNOT GIVE REFUND

IM SELLING SEVERAL OTHER DVD PLEASE TAKE A LOOK