Nine Queens (15)

Beware of mustard chuckers

When you watch a film about confidence trickery, you know from the start that everything you see will be flim-flam laid on for your benefit. You know the film-maker is a grifter and you're the patsy, so you're on guard. We've all seen The Sting, we've all seen David Mamet's films and the vintage Mission: Impossible TV scams: we weren't born yesterday. And that's why we're prone to swallow the bait yet again – there's no one so vulnerable as suckers convinced of their own smartness.

Argentinian thriller Nine Queens illustrates this point neatly. Marco, played by the saturnine Ricardo Darín, is a con artist milking the streets of Buenos Aires for all they're worth. His meanest trick, which involves squeezing money from tender-hearted old ladies, is second nature but hardly a worthy game. The real challenge is to rook someone unrookable: a corrupt, fabulously wealthy Spanish businessman, Vidal Gandolfo (Ignasi Adabal). Marcos works an elaborate bluff to get Gandolfo hooked on a scam, without letting him know he's being played. It seems to work beautifully, but next thing we know, Gandolfo is deconstructing Marcos's strategy move by move. He's several steps ahead, having seen every double, triple, quadruple bluff in the book – which is precisely why he'll fall this time.

Dazzlingly confident for a first feature, Fabian Bielinsky's film is a textbook demonstration of the art of misdirection, with our suspicions becoming part of the game: Bielinsky lets us spot his marked cards while concealing his real tricks elsewhere. He assimilates our suspicions and uses them to fuel the energy of his narrative – the very strategy his heroes use on their prey. Nine Queens is one piece of smart business after another, the first half-hour practically a primer in basic swindling skills. It begins with the lost-looking Juan (Gaston Pauls) pulling a short con in a gas station, a desultory trick to win a handful of chump change; caught, he's bailed out by the older Marcos. Needing an accomplice for the day, Marcos enlists Juan and teaches him some elementary manoeuvres: how to get free newspapers, how to pick up banknotes in cafés. It all seems paltry stuff, mean-spirited and inordinately hard work given the small stakes, but it's the way of the world. In a dizzying montage, Bielinsky gives us a lightning survey of Argentine street life: cons and predators on every corner, or as the subtitles put it, hooks, hoists, petermans, mustard chuckers, a range of subspecies even Damon Runyon never suspected.

It all starts, then, with a courting dance between old-timer and apprentice, and between Bielinsky and viewer: are you in or are you out? Then Nine Queens raises the stakes. Marcos is offered a slice of a fail-safe plan to sell Gandolfo a set of forged Weimar stamps, the "nine queens" of the title. But wild factors keep creeping in to make the game more complicated – more and more outsiders to be cut in, Marcos's beautiful and ferociously straight-edged sister Valeria (Leticia Bredice), and a sudden twist that sends the film off on a brief, breakneck chase sequence.

Meanwhile, Juan is learning fast and proving a born bluffer – and the sharper he gets, the more we fear he's getting out of his depth. Just look at the way Valeria sashays away from him in slo-mo across a hotel lobby: we know Juan is hooked. This is the sort of subtle sideways touch Bielinsky occasionally puts into a film that largely appears stylistically neutral: another is the nerve-grinding cutaways to a paper shredder devouring the evidence of who knows what boardroom skulduggery.

Con tricks and con movies alike, we learn, are about the finer skills of acting. The scene where Juan, on his own initiative, calls the businessman's bluff is entirely about the fine balance between sticking to the script and throwing in ad hoc improvisations to raise the stakes. The performances are terrific. Goateed Darin seems suavely demonic at first, then gradually emerges as a seedier, sadder figure, as we realise how much life-sapping energy goes into Marcos's irredeemably small-time manoeuvring. Pauls is a perfect foil as the street-soiled ingenu Juan, a shabby overgrown calf. And Leticia Bredice is fearsome as Valeria, a woman who seems to click as she walks, in her tight corset of hard corporate manners.

Nine Queens proceeds in a series of knight's moves – you can follow every oblique shift, but you can't predict the final pattern. The outcome, in fact, is very much to do with Argentina's current woes. Nine Queens is a product of that country's recent film-making resurgence, which also produced Lucrecia Martel's La Cienaga, and which the country's economic collapse has probably scuppered. It's hard not to see Bielinsky's film as a prediction of catastrophe: it could certainly be read as a portrait of a nation where desperate players, at every level of society, are on the make and out of their depth. Every cheap chiseller in the film protests that he's not a crook, but the crime isn't just at street level: the businessman says, "I'll be sad to leave this country – I've never seen such good will for doing business." This satirical streak no doubt helped make the film a hit in Argentina, but I hardly think Bielinsky is depicting his nation as unique in its corruption and venality. If this superbly entertaining film gets remade in the Enron/WorldCom-era US, don't be at all surprised.

j.romney@independent.co.uk