User Reviews

I don't have any experience with identity thieves or con men, but I know what it's like to see what you want to see. For years, comparisons were drawn between my father and I. I saw the similarities between us too, same as anyone else. With the advent of mail order DNA/ancestry kits, I found out my dad wasn't my biological dad. We had zero DNA in common. I was shocked and initially looked for ways it wasn't true, before accepting reality. Like I said, my family and I all saw similarities, (we thought were) plain as day. With my own version of seeing what you want to see in supposed family, motivated by an emotional desire, it allowed me to empathize with the Barclays.

I was very unimpressed with the FBI agent. She seems to possess zero humility, which prevents her from being able to remain objective. -First, she interviewed Frederic and was fooled by him. Like she said, he was either being honest or was a fantastic actor. Well, she clearly fell for his act. -THEN, the local PI sees something the FBI does not, which again, brings the FBI agent's competency into question. The PI reports his observations, WITH photographic evidence to back it up, and she ignores him. She should have at least considered what he was saying for a few minutes. She obviously thinks so highly of herself, she couldn't possibly be wrong, nothing could possibly get by her, a local PI couldn't POSSIBLY see something she missed. Her unwillingness to explore other perspectives or angles REALLY annoyed me. Narcissism has no place in such delicate circumstances. -When Frederic made the accusation that the mother and older brother killed Nicholas, AND THE FBI AGENT BELIEVED HIM, a pathological liar who fooled her before, I was shocked. There was zero hard evidence. How was she ever employed by the FBI?! I even rewound the bit where they jump to "the mom and Jason killed Nicholas", thinking I missed something or didn't hear why. Nope. There was never a legitimate reason, besides Frederic's wild lies. -When the FBI agent can't think of a reason the Barclays wouldn't want her conducting DNA testing, aside from having something to hide, I was hoping she was no longer employed by the FBI. She was looking at things in a cold, cynical manner. There was no humanity involved, whatsoever. I can think of a reason the family was so opposed to a DNA test, besides a nefarious ulterior motive. Denial is not just a river in Egypt. The Barclays lost Nicholas 3 years prior, which would have been a colossal emotional trauma, with next to no closure. Times helps wounds, so after 3 years, the pain from losing Nicholas had probably lessened. To have the wounds ripped open again, have their hope restored, and be relieved to finally get to hold him again would have been a powerful blinder. Even if, in the back of their head, they knew something wasn't quite right, it would have been extremely excruciating to voluntarily admit that Frederic was not Nicholas, because it would put them back to square one, and then some. It was much more comfortable to remain in denial or maintain that they'd found Nicholas. That kind of pain is probably what led to Nicholas's mother lying down in peaceful protest, refusing to take a DNA test, if that ever happened. What the family said happened and the FBI agent said happened were two very different accounts, which usually means someone's lying. We shouldn't be so quick to assume it's the Barclays. I just can't believe the FBI agent couldn't see a motive for not wanting to prove Frederic wasn't Nicholas. I thought FBI agents would be trained better, but I guess at the end of the day, she's still just a human being with a badge, fallible like everyone else. I just don't understand why she can't admit to errors or even consider she might be wrong. -I was appalled when the FBI agent talked about making Nicholas's mom take the polygraph 3 times. The FBI agent kept saying "it can't be right", when it came up with a result she didn't like. She was practicing confirmation bias, which is to say she wanted facts to suit theories INSTEAD OF allowing theories to suit facts. Her theory was that Nicholas's mom killed him and the FBI agent wanted the facts to prove that, so she had the polygraph administered until the results she wanted showed up. Nicholas's mom passed 2 out of 3 polygraph tests, but the FBI agent chooses to ignore that and focus on the third and last test administered. I'll be honest, if I already took a lie detector test twice and passed, especially if I was innocent and being accused of murdering my own son, but that wasn't the result my interrogator had in mind...I'd probably be agitated by the third test as well. Nicholas's mom isn't James Bond, trained to fool a polygraph test. She's a blue collar worker, for crying out loud! I just felt the way the FBI agent conducted herself was totally inappropriate. Maybe she was embarrassed she fell for Frederic's act, just like everyone else, and launching a murder investigation was her way of saving face. She needs to find a way to deal with failure and embarrassment that doesn't inflict emotional turmoil on a grieving mother. The FBI agent's ego was out of control. It honestly reminded me a bit of Making a Murderer. A documentary on Netflix about a man named Steven Avery.

This is the documentary, of the many I saw during the Perth Revelation Film Festival 2012, that has stuck to my memory, and the one that fascinated me the most.

The documentary revolves about the vanishing of a 13y.o boy, Nicholas Barclay, for his home in Texas in 1993, to be found in Spain with an apparent amnesia six years later. What happens after the young man call the Spanish Police is the core of the film.

The movie mixes interviews with the protagonist Frédéric Bourdin, Nicholas' family, American FBI and Consular officials, and has very atmospheric re-enactments done with Spanish actors and settings narrating the events occurred in Spain. The story is build up like in a thriller, and it will keep you glued to the screen, wanting to know what is going to happen next.

Layton has given the documentary the tone of a mystery movie in the re-enactments, but also in the interviews through the use of the chiaroscuro, camera positioning, hues of the film, and the tempo and way the events are presented - everything serves to build up suspense and mystery, and make you doubt and question yourself. Is this a real documentary or a mockumentary? Are we being fooled? The story is fascinating and amazing per se, but the way it is presented, is marvelous from a cinematic point of view as lets the viewer munch on a few philosophical themes: self-identity, reality and perception of reality, the connection between emotion and perception, and the use of cinematic narratives in documentaries based on real events, among other things.

One of the main downs of the movie is that Nicholas' family is somewhat ridiculed and vilified for the sake of the storyline. After all, we need of good, bad, stupid and clever characters in a story to create an interesting film. In the first place they are portrayed as ignoramuses; however, they are a suburban family living in a poor area of the USA, with little or none education; you cannot expect much of any person grown in this social environment anywhere in the world. In the second place, they are ridiculed for failing to detach themselves from their emotions and see something really obvious for the spectator; however its a characteristic of human nature and behavior to attach emotion to our thoughts and to interpret what we see according to our own personal individual viewfinder. We do so, all of us, every single day, in our daily lives, so you cannot expect traumatized and emotional people to see things as clearly as we see them from our seat in the cinema. In the third place, the movie implicitly blames the family, by letting some of the characters doing so, for the vanishing of Nicholas, without providing any evidence for it.

Still, this is a terrific documentary. The less you know about the whole story at the beginning, the more you will enjoy it. This is a documentary that attracts people to the genre because reinvents it. A proof that a documentary can be amazing, intriguing, entertaining, and thought provoking.

While it's fascinating to have a documentary in such detail on both sides of a criminal act, it's most interesting aspect is watching the development of a mad man unfold in just a single shot spread over the whole film. At first, Frederic Bourdin appears charming and approachable as he explains his old thought processes with a smile. Over the film's progression, in which we're treated to Man On Wire-esque re-enactments, it's clear he actually has no remorse and his pride is unsettling, especially as this case is just one of the many. Although the film does underwhelm in the end slightly, that can't be helped for it's a documentary, the best aspect is the slick photography in both the interviews and re-enactments making it look incredibly cinematic. The Imposter is a really well constructed film that makes its unbelievable story work and keeps a consistent level of intrigue and anxiety throughout, even if in an ideal world, it should be building up to a finer payoff.

8/10.

"The Imposter" plays like a particularly good episode of "Unsolved Mysteries," not just because actual documentary footage is interspersed with reenactments, but also because the true story it tells is a thoroughly absorbing combination of intrigue and suspense. As with all good thrillers, fictional or non, what begins as a seemingly simple crime eventually escalates into something much more complicated; it's not so much about who has done something as it is about what has actually happened and why. Truth is always a murky subject, mainly because it depends entirely on perception. In this case, because our sources of information prove to be unreliable, we can't even trust what we perceive. On the one hand, we have a family who may know more than it's letting on. On the other hand, we have the title subject, a notorious pathological liar.

The film simultaneously documents and dramatizes the case of Nicholas Barclay, who disappeared in June of 1994 at the age of thirteen. When he was last seen, he was playing basketball with his friends in his native San Antonio. A street smart kid with a history of behavioral problems and a juvenile criminal record, he had run away before, and it was initially assumed that he had run away again. However, when his absence stretched beyond his typical window of one day, it was obvious that something more serious had taken place. It wouldn't be until 1997 that a new chapter of the case would begin. In October of that year, the police in Linares, Spain received a phone call from a tourist reporting a lost, frightened, apparently traumatized teenage boy with no identifying documents. He initially said little to authorities, but eventually, he told them he was an American named Nicholas Barclay.

He claimed he had escaped from a child prostitution ring and that his memories of his life back in Texas had grown dim. He also claimed that his originally blonde hair and blue eyes were chemically treated by his abductors to appear brown, and that his distinctly European accent and phrasing was the result of having been away from the U.S. so long. The Barclay family was soon contacted, even though no one in Spain could be sure of the boy's story. Nicholas' older sister, Carey, flew all the way to Spain to retrieve him from a children's shelter, and although she was heartbroken by the profound changes she noticed, she believed that he was in fact her long lost brother. Once embassy officials and U.S. federal agents were satisfied and he was sent back to San Antonio, the rest of the Barclays believed it as well. And so life would go on until March of 1998, when the persistence of a skeptical private investigator named Charlie Parker lead to the discovery that the person living with the Barclays was not sixteen-year-old Nicholas.

He was, in fact, twenty-three-year-old Frenchman Frédéric Bourdin, who began impersonating others as a child and by 2005 had assumed nearly forty false identities, three of which were of missing teens. The press has nicknamed Bourdin, now nearly forty, The Chameleon. After pleading guilty to passport fraud and perjury in San Antonio, he was sentenced to six years in prison. He would continue to assume identities in both the U.S. and Europe, until, supposedly 2005, at which point he vowed to retire. Although he's now married with three children, I take his vow about as seriously as I take his claim that he never knew his father, that his mother had tried to abort him and would eventually abandon him, that he was raised in a children's home, that he was sexually abused, and that he did what he did as a way to find the love and affection he never received. His history, coupled with his theoretically candid interview footage, leaves me with no reason to believe him.

But that isn't the end of the story. How is it possible that the Barclays were so blind to the obvious physical differences between Nicholas and Bourdin? Why were they so willing to believe his story and let him stay in their home? Could it be that they had something to hide? It eventually came to light that both Nicholas' mother and older half- brother were both in the throes of severe drug addictions, and that the mother failed the second of two polygraph tests when questioned about the disappearance. The half-brother was considered a person of interest, but his death in 1998 as the result of a cocaine overdose effectively stalled the investigation. To this day, the remaining Barclays deny any involvement in Nicholas' disappearance. And Nicholas is still listed as a missing person.

The reenactments, deliberately vague in the way they look and sound, feature Adam O'Brien as Bourdin, Anna Ruben as Carey, and Alan Teichman as Parker, the latter starring in a chilling segment where a corner of a relative's back yard is dug up in search of Nicholas' body. According to Wikipedia, these dramatized segments were precisely why a viewer who saw the film at the Seattle International Film Festival objected to its classification as a documentary. I think this person is too focused on labels; the simple fact is, a true story is being told. That the facts of the case are open for debate, that there has been no closure for the Barclay family, is something director Bart Layton cannot be held responsible for. "The Imposter" is about deception, of others and of ourselves, and as such, it makes for an irresistible cinematic experience.

-- Chris Pandolfi (www.atatheaternearyou.net)

The Imposter (2012)

A creatively made documentary about a French man who was able to take on the identity of someone else against all the odds. This isn't a wild tale like the man who was doctor and airplane pilot and so on, but rather just a young man posing as a kid so he could get into a children's home and be taken care of.

Or that was step one. When he was about to be discovered he then pulls one charade after another and ends up in Texas. The gullibility of the family who takes him in is part of the talking head zaniness of it all.

Or so that's step two. Or four. The movie takes a whole series of twists because of how the story is told to us. (There is a little feeling of being manipulated and tricked which doesn't feel quite fair, actually, but this does keep you interested.) By the end you know exactly what happened (with one major detail up in the air) and there is a satisfying, wow, what a tale feeling.

The filming is really elegant, with really brilliant editing. I think it could have been more compact, and more impactful, but it never really slows down. The cast of characters gradually grows as the investigation into the facts changes, too, which is interesting, leading to the best character of all (beyond the French leading man), an old gumshoe driving his Cadillac and getting to the bottom of at least some of the facts the old fashioned way.

You might critique this kind of story by simply saying it would make an amazing amazing segment on 60 Minutes. But that would be 20 fabulous minutes. Instead it's stretched and stretched into five times that (five!) and all the extra details and atmospheric filler makes it very long. Boring? No, not really, but when you're done you'll know it could have been more by being less.

On June, 13, 1994, Nicolas Barclay went missing. Last seen playing basketball with his friends in San Antonio, Texas. There was no word of his whereabouts for days, weeks, months, years until it was assumed he would be missing forever, the search having long since died out. Then the incredible happened. He was discovered in Linares, Spain.

Or was he? The Nicolas that went missing 3 years earlier had had blue eyes not brown and the new Nicolas had a french accent? This new Nicolas was actually Frederic Bourdin a 22 year old French-Algerian, with an addiction to and talent for deceit and fraud. Nevertheless he managed to fool the Barclay family, US embassy officials, the FBI and most of America, if not the world, into believing that he was indeed Nicolas Barclay. But one man had his doubts. A charismatic Texan private eye, Charlie Parker, originally hired to track down Nicolas for an interview with a local media company, noticed an irregularity between the two Nicolas's ears, which eventually lead to Frederic's discovery and arrest.

This captivating and chilling story is beautifully explored by the director Bart Layton. He blurs the boundaries between a documentary and blockbuster. Even though Layton allows you to be aware that Frederic is not the real Nicholas Barclay from the outset, he teasingly feeds you fragments of the story piece by piece from the perspectives of the family members, the officials and Frederic himself. The product is a gripping thriller, heightened by the knowledge that it is a true story and by the mesmerising stylised cinematography, including some eery moving portraits of the family members accepting an obvious stranger into their home. This is just one of the many striking images in this film that will stay with me for a long time.

Provoking questions about identity, human nature, society and national security, the Imposter our keeps you eager with anticipation while you bathe in the beauty of the images crafted by Layton. It's a brilliant film - one of the best thrillers, let alone documentaries, I have seen.

'THE IMPOSTER': Three Stars (Out of Five)

Documentary detailing the 1997 impersonation case where a French 23-year-old con artist pretended to be a missing 16-year-old boy and began living with the kid's family (unbeknownst to them amazingly). The film uses interviews with those involved as well as several reenactments (using actors) to tell it's story. It was directed by Bart Layton, who's previous experience is solely in TV documentaries (and it shows). The film has a strong TV crime show feel to it but it's still interesting and somewhat involving. I'm not big fan of acted out reenactments (in documentaries like this) but it does help the film better tell it's story. Not a great documentary (and it doesn't quite live up to it's critical acclaim hype) but it's still an interesting one.

The film tells the story of Frederic Bourdin, a French 23-year-old con artist who had a long record of impersonating children. In this case he convinced a Texas family that he was their 16-year-old son (who had been missing for three years) from a missing children's office in Spain. The family buys his story (as does almost everyone else), even after meeting him, despite the fact that he looks nothing like the blond haired, blue eyed kid and speaks with a French accent. He tells authorities that he had been kidnapped by U.S. military and transported to Spain for sexual abuse. A private investigator (Charles Parker) and an FBI agent (Nancy Fisher) begin suspecting something isn't right from the get-go even though everyone else is duped. Suspicions also arise as to why the family was so eager to believe this stranger was undoubtedly their child.

The movie is very eerie, disturbing and bizarrely interesting but that's more so just because of the fascinating story than the filmmakers' storytelling methods. I didn't really care for the crime TV format and found it a little emotionally void and uncinematic. Still the events depicted make for a good movie. It's the kind of story that no one would buy if it were known to be fiction. Viewers would totally have a problem with the believability of the film if they thought it came from someone's imagination but because it's based on facts they'll eat it up. Truth is always stranger than fiction and this is one strange story.

Watch our movie review show 'MOVIE TALK' at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8-fGGKVWPc

They def killed the boy. A family of drug addicts. The family members are all pathological liars. It's sickening. I hope there's justice for the deceased boy. You can tell that they're all lying through their teeth!! I wish they would tap their phones or something. It'll end up coming out.

This documentary is pretty devoid of civilized humanity. It's like it was made by a sociopath about a sociopath. It's a mockery of people who are driven to make bad choices because of trauma and the worst pain imaginable. Totally exploitative in nature and not even that well-made at all.

spoilers ahead:

The end scene showing them digging up the yard of the family's old house was completely unnecessary. They found nothing yet tried to imprint as hard as they could that the family had this huge shadow of doubt over them. This movie was taking the word of literally the biggest liar in the world. The imposter imbecile probably holds a world record in lying.

The only person more stupid than the filmakers, and the imposter, is the FBI agent who swallowed every one of his words without even questioning the likelihood or the global scandal that would be involved making worldwide headlines of american boys being kidnapped by people in the military for sex slavery with technology to change their eye color in the 90s. I mean just effing insane for her not even to question the facts. Then she doubled down on her idiocy by believing the imposter that the family murdered the missing child when there was zero, I mean literally zero evidence except her making the woman take the lie detector test over and over until she got the result she wanted from the grieving mother.

The imposter himself is the grossest, ugliest excuse for a human being I have ever seen. He literally is trying to get compassion from people with his dumb, "my grandfather was racist against my father" b.s. I'm sorry millions have suffered the same and didn't go on to exploit the good intentions of every person he encountered and the literal tragedy and pain of the family of the missing kid. He's a thief in every aspect of the word. He's ugly and insane and his voice is the most annoying thing you'll ever hear.

Don't waste your time on this, there is nothing to be gotten out of it. Nothing edifying or redeeming. Just low moments by humans exploited for money.

I read a few reviews which admonished me not to discover too much about this "mysterious and compelling" story beforehand so I didn't.I really enjoy good documentary films so I watched it with an open mind and was ready to be compelled and mystified but I wasn't in the least.I found it all too obvious. A dark-haired French-speaking young man pretends to be a missing blond-haired English-speaking American boy and is apparently welcomed by his clearly dysfunctional family with open arms.So what's going to happen? He is discovered to be a fake(duh)and the family fall under suspicion and we eventually discover that one of them was a junkie and killed himself shortly after the boy went missing.Not much mystery or compulsion there. We are told of the mesmerising abilities and evil nature of the bogus heir apparent but he is no more than a failed chancer,more intelligent than he wants to appear but not as bright as he thinks he is.I've met plenty of those.The only surprise I found was how unbelievably thick and incompetent the relevant American officials were.It was like watching a thriller where you work out the entire plot in the first five minutes and then sit there bored stiff as it unfolds exactly thus. I'm sorry to review this film so negatively when many people obviously enjoyed it but if you are looking for mystery and intellectual challenges,you won't find them here in my opinion. A well-crafted but spuriously sensational film.