Film; Unseen Yet Seen, A World Of Evil
FROM the moment it was first shown in theaters here, 'Nine Queens,' a modest caper film by Fabian Bielinsky, was a commercial and critical success. But one scene so unnverved Argentine audiences that the film has become a cultural phenomenon, dissected and analyzed countless times in newspapers and on radio and television.
In the scene, a small-time scam artist named Marcos introduces his wide-eyed apprentice, Juan, to an alternate reality, one hidden away in plain sight as they stand on a busy downtown corner. Where Juan sees only a crowd rushing about, Marcos recognizes a universe of con men, car thieves, pickpockets, purse snatchers and other petty crooks, all just waiting for a chance to pounce.
'They are there, but you can't see them,' the cynical Marcos (Ricardo Darín) advises the younger, seemingly naïve Juan (Gastón Pauls). 'That's what it's all about: they are there, but they are not there. So mind your briefcase, your windows, your car, your savings.'
Over lunch here, Mr. Bielinsky, who wrote and directed the film, recalled with a grin: 'Audiences went into the theater without a care in the world and came out looking over their shoulders and with suspicious looks on their faces. It showed them an invisible world they were not aware of but which is all around us, perhaps as close as that guy at the next table.'
With 'Nine Queens,' which opens in New York on April 19, Mr. Bielinsky has engaged in a similar process of deception. On the surface, his film is a crime yarn, portraying 30 hours in the lives of a pair of swindlers who stumble onto the deal of a lifetime: selling a forged set of rare Weimar Republic stamps known as 'the Nine Queens' for nearly $500,000.
Yet 'Nine Queens' has a subtext that has encouraged Argentines to see it as an allegory for the entire get-rich-quick mentality that prevailed here during the decade from 1989 to 1999, when Carlos Saúl Menem was president. Those years of 'pizza and champagne' are now over, but they left a legacy of spiritual and material impoverishment that Mr. Bielinsky found hard to ignore.
'The idea of sudden wealth has always been incorporated into the psychology of the Argentine, but during the 1990's it reached obscene levels and reached into the highest spheres of politics and government,' he said. 'We were forced to be witnesses to impunity and corruption, indifference to the common welfare and absolute frivolity, so of course a movie like 'Nine Queens' reflects that state of affairs.'
After the disintegration of the Argentine economy in December, in fact, 'Nine Queens' seems almost prophetic. But the underlying idea for the movie, Mr. Bielinsky said, 'emerged from my own fascination with the psychology of crime.' Researching the subject, he not only read newspaper articles and interviewed police officers, but also watched American movies about con artists, like 'Paper Moon' and 'The Sting,' and the films of Alfred Hitchcock.
'To my surprise, though, my principal source of information turned out to be people who had been victimized themselves by scam artists,' he said. 'Friends, relatives, friends of friends, all of them had stories to tell me about being ripped off themselves or knowing someone who was. As a result, every one of the scams you see in the movie is taken from real life, with the exception of the Nine Queens, which I invented myself.'
Mr. Bielinsky finished the script in 1997 and then tried for more than a year to sell it. 'Producers just didn't get it,' he said. 'The film industry here doesn't go in much for genre pictures. They're good with dramas, or small intimate pictures about relationships, but tend to think of genre pieces as something prohibited for Argentina.'
Mr. Bielinsky, 43, also had to battle what was seen as a lack of experience. Though he had written the screenplays for several feature films, directed short films based on stories by the Argentine writers Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar and worked as an assistant director on some 400 commercials and several full-length films, 'Nine Queens' is his debut as a director.
IN 1998, however, he got his break when he entered the script in a contest and placed first among nearly 350 entries, thereby guaranteeing himself a production deal.
'Nine Queens' was shot with a budget of only $1.3 million, modest even by local standards. So Mr. Bielinsky made certain the cast had plenty of rehearsal time, to assure that no time would be wasted once filming got under way.
'Many of the scenes were filmed in the street, among pedestrians and daily life, almost as if we were carrying out a raid or pulling off a heist,' Mr. Darín recalled. 'We'd drive up somewhere, jump out of a van, shoot the scene and leave, which made us realize how good it was that we were already so well prepared.'
Released in 2000, 'Nine Queens' won just about every award for which it was eligible, from the Argentine Film Critics Association (best picture and six other prizes) and at the MTV Latin America People's Choice Awards. To Mr. Darín, that response confirmed the wisdom of Mr. Bielinsky's decision to focus on plot and character and leave any moral lessons implicit.
The cast, though, always knew that Mr. Bielinsky had a larger point to make. 'When people ask me how I prepared for my role, I like to tell them that I studied Argentine politicians, who are capable of telling the most bold-faced lies with a straight face,' Mr. Pauls said. 'My character does on a small scale what they do on a large scale: he's a small fish, and they are sharks.'
Mr. Pauls also said 'there is a lot of David Mamet in this movie.' But Richard Peña, program director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, which showed 'Nine Queens' in its New Directors/New Films series last year, noted that for all its awareness and embrace of international influences, the movie retains a distinctly Argentine sensibility.
' 'Nine Queens' is an excellent cinematic example of a certain River Plate tradition of paranoid narratives, of which Borges is just one example,' he said. 'A society looks normal on the surface but is run by corrupt secret societies and secret deals, with a conspiratorial atmosphere that leads you to ask who is real and who is just playing a role.'
During the filming, the relationship between Mr. Darín, 45, and Mr. Pauls, 30, echoed the master-and-disciple bond between their characters. Though Mr. Pauls comes from a family of filmmakers, he has been an actor for only eight years and often looked to Mr. Darín for guidance.
'Darín has a real showboat role with great speeches but is able to be both hard and elicit pathos at the same time,' Mr. Peña said, 'while Pauls has to be very subtle, to transmit a sense of quiet power and to show that he is not just a dupe, that there is something going on behind those very innocent eyes.'
Mr. Darín also appears in the sentimental 'Son of the Bride,' nominated this year for the Academy Award for best foreign language film, in the role of a harried, middle-aged restaurant owner forced to reassess his life after a heart attack.
For his part, Mr. Bielensky has received proposals to remake 'Nine Queens' in countries as diverse as the United States, France, Germany, England and Spain. He will probably sell the rights, he said, but made it clear that he does not want to get involved with any remakes himself.
'From the moment they called me to tell me, 'You've won the contest, we're going to make your movie,' I've had nothing but one stroke of good luck after another on this project,' he said. 'I'm still overwhelmed because everything has been ideal. But if I did it over again, it would be like standing in the same place. I hate to abandon this feeling of complete happiness and start something new, but I'm afraid that it's time to move on.'
Larry Rohter is chief of the Rio de Janeiro bureau of The New York Times.