The Imposter - review

An intriguing and well made film that digs deep into the story of a great pretender
Imposter
Allstar
16 September 2012

In June 1994, 13-year-old Nicholas Barclay was reported missing from his blue-collar home in San Antonio, Texas. He’d absconded before and little attention was paid to a troubled family’s worry.

Then, in October 1997, a tourist in Spain reported a frightened and apparently traumatised teenager to the police. Sent to a youth shelter, he eventually told them he was Barclay, and that he had been abducted and sexually abused by men in military uniform who flew him to Europe.

When his sister went to meet him, she identified him — there was a familiar tattoo on his body — and he was returned in triumph to his grateful family. But he wasn’t Barclay; he was a 23-year-old French Algerian called Frédéric Bourdin, a clever imposter who had taken on dozens of false identities before.

British director Bart Layton has only slightly fictionalised this extraordinary story for his documentary, which is told more as a thriller than a statement of hard fact.

Layton interviews Bourdin and Barclay’s mother, both in documentary style and re-enactment form before and after the deception was uncovered, and we see despair turn into hope and then hope turn to despair again. He also shows just how we sometimes believe what we want to believe rather than the likely truth.

An added and excellent feature of an intriguing and very well made film is that a crusty old private investigator, straight out of a B-movie, seeing that photographs of Barclay’s ears and those of Bourdin didn’t match, was the first to doubt the Frenchman’s story. He also believed that someone in the family killed Barclay and started investigating, but with no result.

Bourdin himself, however, is definitively the star of the film — a man with a childlike charm and an iron will to find himself a family as he didn’t have one himself. At one point he says he doesn’t think of his action’s effect on other people but just about its effect on him.

He’s a strange anti-hero, if not quite the villain, of a film which digs almost as deep as the veteran detective into the minds and hearts of its subjects. Maybe Barclay will one day be found, as Bourdin, now married with three children, feared before he was found out. And if he is, perhaps the story will continue.

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in