This astonishing British documentary should help put the oddball French confidence trickster Frédéric Bourdin up there as a candidate for inclusion in the Imposters' Hall of Fame. Not perhaps in the premier league. That's where you'll find the truly legendary figures, most notably the French peasant who turned up at a Pyrenean village in the 16th century, convinced everyone he was the missing farmer Martin Guerre and had two children with the man's wife before the real Guerre turned up; the butcher from Wagga Wagga who in the 1860s claimed to be the missing (presumed drowned) Robert Tichborne, heir to a British title and a fortune – the case becoming a cause célèbre in Victorian England; Anna Anderson, who convinced many people she was Anastasia, Tsar Nicholas II's youngest daughter generally assumed to have been assassinated with the Russian royal family; and Ferdinand Waldo Demara (1921-1982), the intelligent, Mittyesque American who persuaded a succession of employers that he was, among much else, a prison governor, a naval surgeon, an engineer, a psychiatrist and a Trappist monk, declaring truthfully that money was never his object, just "rascality, pure rascality".
But Bourdin's case is quite as curious as theirs, and moreover, in Bart Layton's eye-opening film, he's both played by himself and, in reconstructed sequences, by a lookalike (whereas Tony Curtis none too convincingly impersonated Demara in a biopic called The Great Imposter). Roughly the story is this. In 1994 the 13-year-old Nicholas Barclay, a blue-eyed, fair-haired Texan, son of a working-class family in San Antonio, disappeared without trace on his way home from basketball practice. Three years later the police in Linares in Spain reported that he'd turned up there having apparently been abducted by paedophiles, cops among them, and kept incommunicado for their vile pleasures. His sister flew to Spain and identified him as her brother, as did the rest of the Barclay family – this despite his dark hair, brown eyes, thick accent, poor English and somewhat mature years. Eventually, after living with the Barclay family for almost five months, Bourdin's story unravelled, and he was exposed as a French imposter who specialises in imitating abandoned teenagers. He's more childlike than charismatic, a dangerous innocent.
A series of accidents together with an instinctive gift for manipulation and improvisation helped Bourdin's scheme. But The Imposter has a second chapter that opens up questions not only about how people come to participate in their own deception (which runs through the celebrated stories from the past I've mentioned) but dark, puzzling areas of American life, of which I shall say no more. See The Imposter, meet the real people involved (including an elderly Texas private eye who, as they say, has stepped right out of the movies), and enjoy one of the year's most provocative pictures.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/aug/26/the-imposter-review-frederic-bourdin
Alejandro Agresti Alejandro Amenábar Alejandro González Iñárritu Alejandro Jodorowsky
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