Nine Queens (2000)

Fabián Bielinsky's Nine Queens arrives from the year 2000, a lean Argentine caper concerning two grifters attempting to move a forged sheet of stamps to a corrupt Spanish collector. It is constructed almost entirely out of gears. The script clicks, the cons nest inside other cons, and the whole apparatus resolves with a twist that has been admired for a quarter century. Nothing here asks the audience to approve of anyone. The characters are thieves, the mark is a thief, the justice system is a rumor, and the camera regards all of it with the flat patience of a ledger clerk.

Assessments of the film's social dimension tend to reach for the corruption of Argentine institutions at the turn of the century, and there is something to that. The wealthy collector is a fugitive from his own crimes, the bank collapses through management fraud, and the con artists operate in the space left by a state that has stopped pretending. But the target is grift, not the economic order itself. Bielinsky has no interest in indicting a system. He wants the mechanism to work, and it does.

Elsewhere the pickings are barren, which is not a complaint. Valeria's arrangement with Vidal is transactional and wearying, treated as a piece of business. The cast is Argentine because the story is Argentine. Nobody lectures. The film's moral instruction, such as it is, comes from watching a man get taken apart by the people he spent years taking apart, and even that lands as craft rather than sermon. A lesser picture would have paused to explain what it all meant. This one keeps moving, and stands as a reminder that a film can be entirely about greed without ever becoming about greed.