Early into Bart Layton's unsettling documentary, the filmmakers employ a striking gimmick that while initially jarring, ultimately helps elevate The Imposter from a good film to an excellent one.
The opening salvo is high-concept enough already: A stylish mixture of one-on-one interviews spliced with reconstruction footage details the tragic disappearance of 13-year old Texan Nicolas Barclay, culminating in the tantalising reveal that 3 years after vanishing without a trace, Nicolas has apparently resurfaced in Spain, traumatised and unable to speak.
Just as this preamble lets us settle into a seemingly conventional whodunnit, with a jolt the film is physically rewound: spooling past the interviews with teary-eyed family members, back past the reconstructions, we arrive once again at the opening credits. The film then starts anew, and as we re-watch the reconstructed footage of an unknown child hiding scared in a Spanish phone booth, an accented male voice chimes in, informing us of how he impersonated Nicolas Barclay, and of his expertise in manipulation.
This meta-narrative twist of rewinding the film we're watching is lifted wholesale from Michael Haneke's Funny Games, and benefits greatly from the comparison. Anything that references this scene is certainly going to create a deep sense of unease in anyone who recognises it. In an interview for Funny Games, Haneke explained that he constantly tries to give the viewer an out over the course of the film, so that if the audience persists beyond each narrative break, they have to bear the responsibility of their decision to do so.
Similarly, once we realise that the disembodied voice is none other than Frederic Bourdin, serial missing-child impersonator wanted by Interpol for many years, we are forced into a compromising position. The filmmakers have signaled to us that we are sharing company with an unreliable narrator: the eponymous Imposter. Right from the off we know something is deeply wrong, but we decide to go along for the ride regardless.
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| Frederic Bourdin |
Then, of course, there's the voyeuristic pleasure of having Bourdin tell us what was really going on while doe-eyed clueless family members and FBI agents hopelessly try to piece together the events that characterise this truly bizarre story.
Profound creepiness notwithstanding, Bourdin turns out to be a gifted storyteller, hardly surprising given his honed ability to convince all those around him of the most unbelievable things. How else could a 23-year old Frenchman with dark hair and brown eyes convince a family and the FBI that he was a 15-year old blonde-haired blue-eyed teenager from Texas? It is a testament to his easy charm and ability that for the most part his story comes off as wholly believable.
Large portions of the film feature close-ups of Bourdin, now approaching 40, his face filling the screen with his coy, knowing smile, as he excitedly guides us through the twists and turns of this implausible story. Despite his disturbing sang froid, it is everyone around him who comes off looking bad by corroborating his claims; claims that would have most of us scoffing in disbelief.
The audience is essentially forced into judging the naive family and FBI for their lack of deductive awareness, rather than sympathising with what are essentially a group of easy "marks" who have been exploited by a master puppeteer.
Hence when Bourdin offers a sinister explanation of the family's unsettling eagerness to accept him as their missing son, we're ready to buy the theory that their naivete might have been a deception. Only later upon reflection does it become abundantly clear that if anyone in the film was being deceptive, it was surely Bourdin himself. It leaves the viewer uncertain as to whether Bourdin was ultimately spooked by the implausibility of his own situation and jumped to a dark conclusion, or whether he had in fact fooled the world once again.
As an invisible fly on the wall, the audience can feel safely distant from the intimate violation Bourdin's deception brings on his victims. The brilliant third act shatters this assumption. If I'm honest, for a good 10 minutes I bought the family's complicity hook, line, and sinker. I actually wanted Bourdin to be telling the truth. One way or another I had been fooled by a narcissistic psychopath drawing me into his ficitonal world.
My unofficial diagnosing of Bourdin as a psychopath (often falsely termed sociopath) may seem initially hasty, but as someone who works in psychiatry it is difficult not to reach that conclusion.
Born to a rejecting mother and an absent father, Bourdin builds the image of a victimised orphan in search of parental love. Certainly, witnessing the nature of his crimes makes it clear that his pathology is very specific and even tragically relatable, but this does not preclude a concomitant personality disorder. He is at the very least a narcissist, and at worst, a classic psychopath according to Hare's checklist. This does nothing to reduce the complexity of his crime, nor does it ruin the incredible suspense the film generates in spades. For me, it helps reduce the ambiguity surrounding his story.
I think Bart Layton might have arrived at the same conclusion. The film begins with the only existing archive footage of the the real Nicolas Barclay. This short home video, filmed by Nicolas himself, actually bookends the film, and it becomes clear as Bourdin's voice-over is introduced that this footage was to be our last glimpse of reality before as an audience, we are collectively sucked into the weird fantasy world of Frederic Bourdin.
