Film: The Imposter

Director: Bart Layton
Genre: Documentary
Source: UK (2012)
Rating: R
Location/Format: Netflix Streaming
Grade: B

If The Imposter were a fictional film or an episode of Law & Order: SVU (and it probably was the basis of one), you would laugh it off as silly Hollywood writing. The fact that it is instead a documentary makes it both more fascinating and more bizarre than anything fictional.

In 1994, 13-year-old disappears from his Texas home, seemingly without a trace. Three years later, his family receives a phone call from law enforcement officers in Spain saying that they have found Nicholas Barclay, now 16. He tells a tale of kidnapping, abuse, psychological torture, and medical experimentation. His skin and hair are darker, his eye color has changed, and he speaks with a French accent. Yet remarkably the family takes him home and claims to be overjoyed to have found Nicholas. 

But Nicholas is not Nicholas.

None of this is really spoiler territory. The story, which briefly made headlines in the 90s, brings us into the "truth" of the situation immediately, both through its title and through extended interviews with Frederic Bourdin, the (at the time) 23-year-old Frenchman who claimed to be a sixteen year old Texan. Filmmakers reenact Bourdin's actions as he finds himself deeper and deeper in a lie, and what results is a case in which we feel oddly attached to and sympathetic for this strange man. He clearly enjoys being on camera, the center of attention, and though the filmmakers allude to the own psychological damage that would cause him to delve into this lie, I don't know that we ever fully come to understand him. Instead, the story expands and we begin to question whether more people are deceiving themselves, the authorities, and the filmmakers than originally expected. Director Bart Layton shoots the reenactments--and the interviews--in often shadowy and atmospheric settings, giving the story the feel of a noirish mystery. And yet I'm not sure what real answers we actually get as to why and how this happened.

And maybe that's kind of the point. Much of what we see is not "true"--it is actors recreating a moment. It is individuals telling their perspective, and often those perspectives contradict one another. We leave with the truth itself still enmeshed in shadow, and without a clear understanding of what really happened--both before and after Nicholas's disappearance--and that seems to be intentional. How well can we ever understand another person's motivations? How do lies define us? And is truth inherently subjective?

A thought provoking documentary, and one I can imagine showing my high school students as an interesting example of the form, of the power of the camera, and of the role of editing and music in telling a story.

Alternate Film Title: Nah, The Imposter pretty much sums it up.