There might be about half a dozen queens too many in this initially intriguing but ultimately belabored heist film from first-time Argentine director Fabián Bielinsky. It starts with flim-flam flair as tyro grifter Juan (Gastón Pauls) pushes his luck when shaking down the gullible cashier at a convenience store. He’s rescued by onlooker Marcos (Ricardo Darín, much more appealing than as the whiner in Son of the Bride), who poses as an undercover cop and hustles Juan out onto the street and, sensing a promising student, into the world of big-time scamming. As Marcos introduces Juan into the underworld, the naïf’s apparent innocence grows suspect, especially when he enlists Marcos in his own pet project: selling forgeries of the priceless stamps of the title.

Although immersed in the local color of Buenos Aires and drawing on the even murkier recent Argentine politics, this excursion into the appearance/reality conundrum lacks the elegance of a David Mamet contrivance, let alone a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. Like its anti-hero in the opening sequence, Bielinsky pushes his sleight-of-hand too far, and he crosses the fine line between clever and clumsy long before the anticlimactic dénouement.