Overview
The elusive nature of truth is laid bare in Bart Layton's utterly gripping documentary The Imposter. Through interviews with family members and the sociopath himself we learn that 23-year-old French-Algerian Frederic Bourdin successfully stole the identity of a missing 16-year-old American boy in 2005. His only desire was to belong to a loving family, something he'd always craved. This story is so far-fetched that if it wasn't true no-one would believe it.
How could he fool the family? Not only did he turn up in Spain with no recollection of how he got there but he spoke English with a thick accent and there were stark differences in appearance. Frederic had dark hair and eyes unlike the missing blue-eyed and blonde Nicolas Barclay. Perhaps Nicolas' mother and sister just wanted so very much to believe that they pushed these huge discrepancies from their minds and just had faith.
Early on in the production Layton realised there was no single truth to the events so he decided to make a virtue of the conflicting accounts told to him. He used stylised dramtisations to bring to life the stories the interviewees wanted to express. He hoped to take the audience on a "series of concurrent journeys with a number of compelling characters each with their own version of the truth".
Frederic is a captivating and skilled pathological liar but just when he starts to think he might have pulled off this audacious stunt, doubts arise among the small community. His tall tales of the abuse he suffered at the hands of high-ranking military captors are incredibly vague but provide an all too neat excuse for his apparent memory loss, change of accent and appearance. At the same time he starts to question the family's motive in their stoic defence of him. Maybe there is more than one kind of deception going on here? A beautifully succinct, powerful and thought provoking 95 minutes.