Nine Queens: the perfect con filmed guerrilla-style through the streets of Buenos Aires
One of the greatest Argentine films of all time, with a behind-the-scenes story almost as wild as the one on screen.
🎬 What's it about?
Marcos (Ricardo Darín) and Juan (Gastón Pauls) are two con artists who cross paths by chance one early morning in Buenos Aires. They decide to team up for a day, and the deal of a lifetime falls into their laps: selling a set of forged sheets of extremely rare stamps, the famous "nine queens", to a millionaire collector. From there, the film becomes a twist machine where you never know who's conning whom. The ending is one of the most memorable in Argentine cinema.
🏙️ A snapshot of Argentina in 2000
The film premiered on August 31, 2000, a year before the 2001 economic collapse. And without meaning to, it turned out to be prophetic: there's a scene where a bank shuts its doors, leaving savers pounding on the glass in desperation. A year later, the exact same thing happened in real life with the "corralito" bank freeze. Bielinsky filmed the future without knowing it.
🎥 Shot "like a heist"
With little budget, most of it was filmed on the street without permits to close off traffic. In the bank scene, many of the extras are just bystanders who stopped to see what was being filmed. Pure guerrilla filmmaking, right in the middle of downtown Buenos Aires.
🤕 The actors really got hurt
In the chase scene through Puerto Madero, when the briefcase gets stolen, Gastón Pauls fell and needed stitches in his knee. When they went back to reshoot, Darín tore a muscle. In the end, they used the takes filmed before the injuries.
🎭 Darín and Pauls almost weren't cast
Bielinsky originally wanted Puma Goity for the role of Marcos because he thought Darín was "too likeable." He told him: I don't want anyone to like Marcos. For the role of Juan, he had considered Leonardo Sbaraglia, who turned it down because he wanted a break. The chemistry between Darín and Pauls at the audition sealed the deal.
🎫 It wasn't going to be called Nine Queens
The original working title was "Farsantes" (Fakers). And the seed of the whole story was real: a relative of Bielinsky's was the victim of the classic long con, and that's where the idea came from.
🏆 The success nobody saw coming
They expected around 300,000 viewers. It ended up selling 1,259,602 tickets. It became an icon of New Argentine Cinema and got a Hollywood remake ("Criminal", 2004). Today it's considered a cult classic. Bielinsky directed only two films, this one and "El Aura", before he died in 2006 at 47. With just two films, he's remembered as one of the greatest directors in Argentine film history.
🎩 "El cuento del sobrino" (The Nephew's Tale), one of the best scenes
One of the film's most memorable scenes, showing the art of the con in its purest form.