Twenty-five years ago, Argentinian director Fabián Bielinsky gave us this grifter satire classic, a deliciously cynical tale of swindling and double-cross. It is confidence trickery perpetrated on the victim in parallel to narrative trickery perpetrated on the audience, who are invited to assume that however hard the fictional characters on screen are falling, the rug under their own feet is perfectly secure. Four years later, Hollywood paid this excellent film the traditional compliment of a well-meaning but inferior (and now forgotten) remake, pedantically renamed Criminal, starring John C Reilly and Diego Luna.
Now restored and rereleased, the original looks sharper than ever: a drama of squalid fraud which is a tale of human greed, but also a specific, prophetic jab at Argentina’s financial shady dealers in a deregulated banking system that crashed soon after the film came out. Ricardo Darín made an international name for himself in one of the tough-guy everyman roles that was to become his brand. He plays Marcos, a hard-bitten conman browsing in a convenience store one evening, and amused to notice fresh-faced wannabe trickster Juan (Gastón Pauls) incompetently trying to pull off a petty scam whereby the cashier is bamboozled into giving him too much change. (It’s a cheap trick to compare with that of Tatum O’Neal in Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon or John Cusack in Stephen Frears’ The Grifters.)
