Fabián Bielinsky: 'I'm not saying that everyone in Argentina is a crook...'

This hit film about con men is a victim of bad timing, says Trevor Johnston

Interview a film-maker during the World Cup and you'll be hard-pressed to stop them talking about football. In Fabián Bielinsky's case, he has every right to look glum, his native Argentina, pre-tournament favourites, having left the party unceremoniously early. "We had our best team in years. All the stars, a good coach, and look what happened. It's like a metaphor for the whole of Argentina at the moment. The country has everything: natural resources, the people, the talent, but we're in our worst crisis ever. We really could have used some joy ..."

Funny he should say that, because in the midst of national economic meltdown and the aforementioned woes on the football pitch, writer-director Bielinsky and his film Nine Queens are a decidedly rare article: a recent Argentine success story. An instant hot-ticket on the international festival circuit, it's been a huge hit at home, done well in Spain and made such an impact in the US, Hollywood scripts have started to come Bielinsky's way.

It's not difficult to see what all the fuss is about either, since this twisty tale about two con men trying to fleece a dodgy business magnate with the aid of nine elaborately faked stamps from the Weimar Republic is not only the sort of smart entertainment Tinseltown seems too dumb to make anymore, it's also put together with craft and confidence rare in a first-time film-maker. Still, having spent two fruitless years having his script rejected (before it won a competition and backers finally stumped up the cash), Bielinsky is still coming to terms with his movie's international momentum: "It's like going to the end of your street to get the bus to the office and then finding yourself on the moon ..." he smiles.

Not that he's quite been able to bask in the moment, you understand. Since Nine Queens was finished two years ago, Argentina's recession has slumped into near-collapse, with the plummeting peso prompting serious financial restrictions (among them, a very tight rein on bank withdrawals), resulting in soaring inflation, deepening unemployment and very real hardship. "It's not so good when you are fine and everyone else is not, believe me," he adds, somewhat ruefully. But he stops me in my tracks when I try to float the theory that, with hindsight, the monetary chicanery in his movie makes it something of a historical document of that moment just before the Argentine economy went truly pear-shaped.

"I'm not saying that everybody is a crook, because that would be unfair to all the decent, hardworking people we have. The film's not so much a portrait of ... society, it's more a reflection of a certain mood, a passing sensation you sometimes have in my country that everyone is out to get you. I started writing the script because people had told me so many stories about being conned, and I developed this morbid fascination with the subject."

While promoting it, he has faced constant comparison with David Mamet, who has mined the same celluloid terrain of confidence trickery. Bielinsky's face falls when I so much as mention the "M" word; through gritted teeth he affirms that he's terribly flattered to be even mentioned alongside "such a major guy", then launches into a list of all the previous con-trick flicks from which he's taken inspiration. He's right to get a touch shirty too, since his movie is much less self-conscious, and a rather more joyful experience than, say, The Spanish Prisoner, recalling instead the uncomplicated amusements from an earlier Hollywood era.

"There are lots of earlier movies which got into the whole con man game way before David Mamet, but nobody mentions them. Look at Paper Moon, the black-and-white Bogdanovich movie with Ryan O'Neal. The Sting, of course. Go right back to Fellini's Il Bidone in the Fifties. What about The Flim-Flam Man, another one from the late Sixties, George C Scott training Michael Sarrazin in the art of the swindle? All of them gave much ... enjoyment, and they came first. I love House of Games too, but Mamet isn't the owner of the idea of con men."

Spoken with a true cineaste's assurance, something which hasn't been in short supply in Argentina of late. It may be just a minor part of the national crisis, but it's dismaying nonetheless that the economic downturn should come when the country's film-makers were really on an unprecedented roll. Nine Queens has made the biggest noise internationally, but of the 50 or so features turned out in the two years before the crisis, there's been a Best Foreign Film Oscar nomination for Juan José Campanella's serious comedy The Son of the Bride (already pencilled in for this year's Edinburgh Film Festival), and UK distribution last autumn for Lucrecia Martel's pointed study in bourgeois decay La Ciénaga (The Swamp). Bielinsky puts the explosion of talent down to the 10,000 or so students graduating from Argentina's surprisingly large number of film schools each year, but admits their current prospects are desperately uncertain.

"Effectively, everything is frozen," explains the 43-year-old, a former assistant who admits he learned by watching other directors' mistakes. "The investors are waiting to see what the new rules of the game will be. Right now, nobody knows." He's hopeful, however, that the basis for recovery is there. "You can still release a film and make some money back. Go to Buenos Aires on a Saturday night and you can't get a seat in some restaurants, the cinemas are full. If you travel a few hundred kilometres into the country it's very different; the people there haven't a cent. Hunger is a genuine problem, but underlying everything is this lack of confidence that's really killing us."

Circumstances in which Marcos, the sleek mover and shaker in Nine Queens, would thrive perhaps? Bielinsky reckons his chief schemer (played with Rickmanesque guile by the commanding Ricardo Darín) might prefer his chances in Britain, where there's still a tantalisingly vulnerable aspect of trust in many of our financial transactions. "Back home, I'm not sure whether it's more fruitful for a con artist to have a crisis or a healthy economy, since so much of this work is about personal manipulation. What I will say is that we got into this terrible situation we're now in because of the really big con men in our administration."

'Nine Queens' opens on 12 July