Four Recent Films from Argentina

In the opening scene of Fabian Bielinski's "Nine Queens," Juan (Gaston Pauls), a young conman, has been caught in the act at a Buenos Aires convenience store. Just as the proprietor is about to call the cops, a shopper announces that there is no need to call the cops since he, a plainclothesman, has been tracking the conman for some time and will now deliver him to the police station personally.

As soon as the two leave the store, we discover that the "cop" is really a fellow conman named Marcos (Ricardo Darin), who, when happening on the encounter, decides to rescue a comrade. As the two stroll down the streets of Buenos Aires, we soon discover that Marcos intends to take the greenhorn under his wings and train him in the finer arts of swindling. With some reluctance, Juan decides to apprentice himself. Mostly, what bothers him is the utter amorality of the teacher who is not above conning members of his own family, including his beautiful sister who works at a downtown luxury hotel and who despises him.

It is at this hotel where the house-of-mirrors plot of "Nine Queens" unfolds. There, a wealthy guest becomes the target of an elaborate "sting" concocted by the two. It involves the sale of very rare postage stamps--the nine queens--and the high-stakes measures necessary to convince the buyer that they are real.

Ultimately, "Nine Queens" is less about plot than it is about character. The fresh-faced Juan is relatively guileless in comparison to the demonic-looking Marcos. As they sit down to plan out their various scams, the apprentice keeps threatening to break things off and return to his less ambitious--but more innocent--ways.

Suffice it to say that the audience is being "stung" as the film progresses toward its unexpected climax. As in Herman Melville's "Confidence Man," none of the characters is really as they appear, especially the apprentice. Nor are the various events that move the plot along, including a bank failure. Whether or not, Argentineans regarded this witty film as a commentary on their own society is difficult to say. In a country in which theft is sanctioned at the highest level of government, we must allow for that possibility.

"Waiting for the Messiah" shares with "Nine Queens" a Jewish director (Daniel Burman) and glimpses into the Jewish subculture of Argentina. In "Nine Queens," one of the conmen who has run afoul of Marcos is Jewish. In "Waiting for the Messiah", it is an entire neighborhood, the Jewish community known as "El Once," that has been swindled by the international banking system.

Like the butterfly's wings in chaos theory, the failure of Asian banks in 1997 touches off a chain of events that ultimately reaches the characters in "Waiting for the Messiah." Ariel (Daniel Hendler) is living with his father who runs a combination restaurant and Jewish community center in "El Once." When the meltdown eventually ripples down to Argentina, his father loses his life savings.

Santamaria (Enrique Pineyro) is another victim of the worldwide financial crisis. Formerly employed as a teller by the bank in which Daniel's father kept his savings, he now wanders the streets of Buenos Aires living by his wits. He scavenges through dumpsters trying to find lost property that he will return to the owner for a small fee, including the pocketbook of Ariel's recently deceased mother lost during a mugging. In returning the pocketbook to Ariel, a thin bond develops between the two men but ultimately the film tracks their fate as two separate narratives.

Santamaria, like most Argentinians devastated by the recent economic collapse, is struggling to maintain a sense of dignity. Without any shame, he ventures into a woman's restroom in a train station late at night to do his laundry. There he meets the matron Elsa (Sttefania Sandrelli), who after overcoming her initial shock, allows him not only to do his laundry there on a regular basis, but take showers. Eventually the two fall in love.

"Waiting for the Messiah" works best as a series of vignettes in which the characters are shown trying to adjust to demeaning circumstances. Less concerned with indicting the social and economic system that can produce such circumstances than it is with the efforts of common people to survive within them, it is deeply compassionate in its own modest way.

Directed by Sergio Belloti, "Tesoro Mío" is based on an actual crime, an embezzlement by a middle-level treasurer (tesoro) at the Banco de Argentina.

The treasurer in the film is named Carlos Dietrich (Gabriel Goity in an unforgettable performance), whose branch is in a provincial seaside town, where the main pastime seems to be getting drunk. Carlos, who is turning forty, not only hates his job, but is trapped in a loveless marriage. His only pleasure is screwing a younger woman who works in the next teller's cage at the bank. When she demands that he leave his wife, he complains that he can not afford to.

Although not immediately touched by financial crisis, the middle-class characters in "Tesoro Mío" seem to have nothing to live for except screwing each other's wives or figuring out ways to cheat each other. An old friend suckers Carlos into vetting a falsified financial report for a local country club. This friend is also cuckolding him. In the aftermath of a drunken, vindictive birthday party, in which Carlos finally confronts his wife, he decides to take matters into his own hands and rip off the bank.

"Tesoro Mío" is very much in the tradition of film noir but does not take itself so seriously. The main pleasure of the film is not watching characters betray each other, but rather in off-kilter, sardonic exchanges as they socialize on or off the job. Belloti is a master of irony. For example, when Dietrich is out with some friends late at night in a bog hunting frogs while boozing--a typical moment--two of them get into an altercation. When one removes his shirt to begin fighting, he reveals--most improbably--a Che Guevara t-shirt. This comic detail is one among many in a wickedly delightful film.

"76 89 03," co-directed by Flavio Nardini and Cristian Bernard, refers to three key years in the lives of its three main characters and in the devolution of the country they live in.

In 1976 we meet Dino, Paco and Salvador as schoolboys. They share an obsession with Wanda Manera, an actress and model. Dino is expelled from Catholic school when a teacher finds him masturbating in the boy's room, a magazine photo of Wanda taped to the inside door of the stall. This teacher has just delivered a lecture on the Red Stain that is sweeping across Argentina, a combination of Marxism and masturbation.

After spying Wanda walking down a sidewalk, a distracted Paco rides his bicycle into a car and suffers permanent disability to his leg. 1976, a year of fierce repression against the left, does not reward every Argentinean alike. Salvador, whose father is an auto mechanic, has taken possession of a car that belonged to a "desparacido," or disappeared one. When he makes a gift of the car to his son, he warns him to stay away from politics which is nothing but trouble. It is better to focus on getting women.

In 1989 we find the three friends sitting in a bar getting drunk, while watching a pornographic video of Wanda on television that has scandalized all of Argentina. She is shown having sex with three teenaged boys. These lurid images set in motion a series of events taking place that night in pursuit of their own sexual conquest of Wanda. Despite the 13 years separating them from the opening episode, the three men have not really grown up.

In this black-and-white film, the nighttime odyssey in search of funds to buy Wanda's services take on the quality of a 'walpurgisnacht'. This Buenos Aires of vacant streets and empty parking garages becomes the visual analogue of the men's own barren hopes.

When they stumble across a satchel full of cocaine, they proceed to a discothèque which they hope to sell to the demented proprietor who keeps a 14 year old coke-addicted schoolgirl in a swinging cage in his private quarters. The old man is as obsessed with sex as they are and delivers a long, scabrous monologue about his own unsuccessful conquest of Wanda. Not sensing the trajectory of the film, the Walter Reade audience began guffawing at the crude display. As the monologue grew more ugly, the laughter became more subdued and nervous. Eventually, silence prevailed.

After the sale is consummated, the three men track down Wanda's pimp to arrange a threesome with her. They are disappointed to discover that Wanda will only take dollars since the value of 'australes' diminishes by the hour in a year of Argentina's most febrile inflation.

The pimp suggests that they go to a plaza where black market exchanges of currency takes place 24 hours a day. There they meet a mulatto flower-seller, a front for his black market business, who takes them to a secluded place to make the exchange. When they arrive, he draws out a gun and steals their money. Before he leaves, Dino asks his permission to say something that will take no longer than a minute. Out comes a torrent of racial epithets, but none worse than "Peronista," Dino's most hate-filled curse.

The final episode representing 2003 leaves little changed. Once again the three men are sitting at a bar fantasizing about Wanda. The film-makers leave no doubt about their intention, which is to show a desperate nation lusting after unattainable goals. Although Wanda is a sex-object, she symbolizes the entire cash nexus and commodity fetishism that Argentina's faltering economy can not satisfy.

("Nine Queens" was shown at the Lincoln Center/MOMA New Directors series. The other films were shown as part of an Argentine film festival at Lincoln Center.)