In 1994, thirteen-year-old Nicholas Barclay disappeared on his way back to his San Antonio, Texas home, one of too many children who vanish and are never seen by their families and friends again. Although his family tried to trace him, before long with no leads to go on the trail went cold and the days, weeks, months began to pass with Nicholas' mother and his sister now wanting to hear anything just to give them some sense that this story had ended, even if the boy turned out to be dead. Then three years later his sister received a telephone call from Spain - her brother had been found.
Well, with a title like The Imposter you will already be suspicious, and you would be right to be, though not perhaps for all the reasons you might expect. The spirit of Errol Morris hung heavily over this documentary from television producer and director Bart Layton, his first for the big screen, meaning a particularly cinematic style was employed, most blatantly in the reconstructions of the case for which no footage was available, a trick common to such efforts now that documentaries for cinema were becoming big business if the right tale was found to elaborate upon. Sometimes the makers could be accused of dressing up less than spectacular material - but not in this case.
Here was another truth is stranger than fiction movie which were attaining popularity thanks to the way they coaxed the audience into thinking "What?! No!" with every twist and revelation of their factual narrative, which in this case could leave you feeling as manipulated as the victims of Frédéric Bourdin, the actual subject. He was in 1997 a seasoned and remorseless conman who having tried to get into a children's home so he could be looked after - he was twenty-three at the time - and after being forced into a corner by more of his lies was left alone to contact the family he claimed to have left behind for a traumatic few years at the hands of a ring of powerful and international paedophiles.
If that sounded hard to believe, then what happened next took the biscuit. Bourdain telephoned authorities in the United States and worked out if he claimed to be Nicholas, he could both find a way out of his sticky situation and enjoy a new life as part of a family, which in the film's interview he would like you to be convinced was his goal all along. Whether this was simply him playing on sympathies as he did during his fraudster phase was what offered this its wary texture, one of many works both factual and fictional after the millennium which called reality into question - was it any wonder paranoia was advancing in leaps and bounds throughout society with people like Bourdin wreaking havoc in it?
Yet there was even more to this, and it was true Layton took a little too long in revealing all his cards, whereupon we would discover he had been bluffing and he didn't hold the solution we wanted. That this ended on an ambiguity was frustrating but to be fair there was no other way he could have wrapped it up, but what it did contain was startling enough to sustain it at least to the point where your questions about the case were swamping the facts you were given here. With every minute that passes Bourdain's behaviour grows ever more unbelievable, and then when he finally attains his dream of existing in a family environment his actual upbringing was never able to provide it all goes sour, predictably perhaps, but not in the way you might have anticipated, never mind him. Little wonder that you emerge from The Imposter questioning everyone's motives, wondering what just about everyone here had to hide: it's not a great, never mind admirable, feeling, but such was the spirit of the times the film captured. Music by Anne Nikitin.
