IMPOSTER TRUTH

Film review essay on The Imposter (2012)

My viewing of the documentary film The Imposter (2012: director, Bart Layton) was the 11/6/22 evening online, my very first view. I watched only once and straight (with no stop) but with intervals of ads. That choice of viewing with ads turned out to be a good one. Otherwise, I would have been pulled too much into the spooky unpleasantness as though in a moderate expression. Creepy world, one would say alternatively.

                                                               (me with pearl earing: 2015)

* (SPOILER ALERT is effectively on from here to pretty much all through to the end)

The true story The Imposter encompassed time and locations:

San Antonio, TX: 1994; Nicholas Barclay, 13 years old, did not come back to home and disappeared.

Linares, Spain: 1997; The police took an unidentified boy in custody after a tourist’s call reporting they saw a boy seemingly in a state of being lost.

San Antonio, TX: 1998 onward forward: other sites were Houston and FBI, San Antonio.

2012: The documentary film was released.

2022: A viewer got ice and throw-up feelings. That was me in the US.

*

The narrative bone in the documentary is undoubtedly in the imposter’s confessional speech. I would not say he was likable at the beginning, but there were many sympathetic elements able to be drawn from viewers in his spoken demonstrations. He wanted to be reborn. He looked for a new life. He didn’t know love when grown up. No one cared about his existence. He saw a chance. Or, he created one. Can I make it? No, I shouldn’t do that. Then, I crossed the line, he confessed.

The border crossing was easy and a surprise in fact for the imposter, when the older sister of the missing Nicholas Barclay flew to Spain to bring her brother, now found, back to home. The recognition test by kinship was cleared in a way that the abducted child had been horribly abused, tortured, thus the trauma must have changed him so much.

More than all viewers, the imposter himself was perplexed in a way by the acceptance of the Barclay family. Who is, anyway, this imposter, who diligently made, after the police custody, a series of international calls to the US from the juvenile center, for the best usable and available case to pick up for him? His real identity, revealed later in the film, was Frederic Bourdin. His mother was French and his father was Algerian. He has black hair and brown eyes while the missing Nicholas Barclay had blond hair and blue eyes. When Bourdin was welcomed by and joined the Barclay family in San Antonio, he was already twenty three years old whereas the missing boy was sixteen in that year.

The thread of mysteries are found to be wondered more. Nicholas’ mother insisted the abused and tortured child would need no scrutiny on his trauma and memory loss to dig into. The sister who flew to Spain was fully supportive to the imposter as her brother even by memory lessons from the family photos. According to the imposter’s testimony, only Nicholas’ older brother sensed the falsity immediately when he saw Bourdin. Nevertheless the brother said nothing but ‘Good Luck’ to Bourdin.

Public authorities and a private investigator came into the picture. Different experts talked about Bourdin. The description of his traumatic experience after the abduction in details are too real to deny he is not the victim of the abuse and tortures. Otherwise, he is a fantastic actor. The other observed: no child born and grown up in a family spoken English as native tongue would speak English with accent a few years later like Bourdin. More remarks: the shade on his chin and jaw by shaving does not match a blond sixteen years old boy. First of all, Bourdin dyed his hair to blond (who cannot miss that?) just before the meeting with Nicholas’ sister in Spain.

The private investigator assigned initially by news media got himself into the case. He compared Bourdin’s ear to Nicholas’ by the zoomed up photos on a device. The investigator states ears are like finger prints, able to tell the exact identity of an individual. He concluded Bourdin to be an impostor, from which a question was naturally induced. Why the Barclay accepts Bourdin? This leads to a speculative doubt. The family might have something about Nicholas they want to keep as hidden. That leads to ‘they might have killed the boy’.

Even after the authority discovered Bourdin’s real identity as Frederic Bourdin in cooperation with the US Embassy in France and the French legal sources, the Barclay family did not step back. Nicholas was tortured and traumatized. [A sort of mild solvent] was applied to his eyes to change the color. He was beaten by abusers when he spoke English, that’s why he no longer can speak English like a native speaker. In the meantime, Bourdin began to shift himself. I need to get out of the situation. Then, I need to get out of my mind. This is the second half of the documentary when viewers can really begin to sense what is the nature of a psychopathic liar.

While the mystery about the disappearance of Nicholas has a door to the unsolvable, the wildest guess is the private investigator’s; a family member killed the boy.

Or, if there is anything the family wants to conceal, there might have been an accidental incident which caused the boy’s death and the family conspired to hide it.

Or, the trauma was on the family because of the missing child, so much hard as they wanted to resolve the tragedy in whatever form, even by the willing acceptance of the lie as a path chosen over the sadness as continuing with no end.

In 2012 when the film was made, Nicholas was still a missing person. No murder evidence was found. Frederic Bourdin was discovered to be a seasoned criminal as imposters of not merely three or four. Bourdin also testified the Barclay confessed to him their murder of Nicholas. At that point in the film, the family looked in their dismay. What was that Frederic Bourdin for them?

The fact was that the murder suspicion of Nicholas on the family shed Bourdin’s criminality in a different light. Bourdin was deported to France where he continued to look for usable and available cases of missing children and persons for his usual scheme by international collect calls from the facility he was captured. Weirdly, he had looked happy in dancing, for he was able to get out of one of his mind. The film reports in its end Bourdin married and has three children.

(me circa 1982 in Tokyo: I know, it doesn’t seem approx thirty years passed between this photo and the one above, but such is my case)

Impostors’ truth

What noticeably striking in Frederic Bourdin is that he admits his lies and his plots along with his motivations as his truth. He is also capable of elucidating in his full ability his fear of being discovered as impostor (thus legal punishments), his strong sentiments of alienation, his desire for love and being loved, his longing for belonging to a family and a community. He repeats his awareness of being at the border which he should not cross over. He also repeats when crossing the line, all becomes for him too late to go back.

For me, those things are popping up straight clear from a psychiatrists’ office as if an established model case following the course which experts have already made. In other words, the more a psychopathic liar takes this follow-way up the road, the more he or she can escape. They must have their developed instincts for what to do at any given moment with no need for thinking.

We don’t want to fall in a scheme of such imposters, whom a society often name cons or con artists with the forgivable and indulgence. How misleading!

Whereas there must be different types and levels of liars and deceivers, such genre people as psychopathic liars exist. No monstrous looking. No exhibition of madness to be the most obvious in public. Could be career carriers, family holders, kids are also around.

Quiet or eloquent, deadpan face lecturers. Lacrymal at anytime by necessity or naturally otherwise. Lie as truth, truth as lie. Knowing the best thing to say to get rid of the situation. All moments are for survival, so pitiful at some time, so bold at other time. Smooth riders on a life by any life to steal and pretend. Skills full of skill in hidden or apparent. Well, well, however, imposters’ truths are not lies in my truth or anyone’s.

Be thus in dismay in your turn, imposters! For your truthful lies to embellish in your term of forever!

‘.