If you’re the type of person who is into murder suspicions, child endangerment, shifty characters, drug abuse, outrageous lies, and public scandal (and who isn’t?) then The Imposter is the film for you. In his latest documentary film, director Bart Layton unravels a story so bizarre you have to continually smack yourself in the face to remind yourself that it’s all true.
The story of Frederic Bourdin was first introduced to most people in a 2008 article in The New Yorker. Through unbelievable inflicted-deception and a healthy helping of self-deception Bourdin lied his way out of a youth shelter in Spain and into the home of a San Antonio family who’s son had gone missing years earlier. His convincing lies prove just how willing people can be to believing anything when they are cornered by desperation. Even if that means believing that your blond-haired blue-eyed son could return to you a noticeably older dark-haired brown eyed Frenchman.
As a documentary, this film is done right. You’re immediately broken into the facts. The obvious components of the story are unfolded in a bald-faced confession from Bourdin. Rather than be so obnoxious as to say, “Reality is the new fiction,” in this film’s case it is better to say, “Reality convinces when fiction doesn’t.”
The interviews in The Imposter are heart-felt, honest, and raw both in the depiction of the confused anxiety of the family and in the presentation of the methodical calculations of Bourdin. Indeed, Layton recognizes adeptly that the real questions of the film aren’t “Is it really him?” “Why did he do it?” “How did he do it?” but rather, “How did it happen?” and “Why did the family believe him?” By identifying this crucial distinction, the film amplifies the mechanics that set the machine of deceit in motion. And, as an audience, we’re hungry for every detail of how these events occurred and how exactly it will all fall apart.
Review: The horrific truth about what we want to believe (9/10)
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