At his year?s Dallas International Film Festival Bart Layton?s documentary,?The Imposter, easily sold out its screenings, winning deserved buzz off a talked-about debut at Sundance. You can?t help but talk about?The Imposter after seeing it; it is one of those films that solves riddles only to pose new ones, that peels back a mystery only to suggest a litany of even more baffling questions. You stagger out of the theater still trying to piece together a puzzle that you get the feeling is missing too many pieces to solve.
The Imposter is an Errol Morris-style documentary that retells the improvable and unbelievable story of a young Frenchman, Fr?d?ric Bourdin, who assumed the identity of a missing boy from Texas, Nick Gibson. Gibson disappeared from his San Antonio home and wasn?t heard from or seen until suddenly, three years after his disappearance, he resurfaced on the streets of Spain. Only this Nick wasn?t Nick, it was Bourdin, a enigmatic character who spun a web of lies and was able to mimic the behavior of a troubled and abused 16-year-old so well he managed to convince Spanish and American officials and police, as well as the boy?s family, that he was Gibson. That landed the 22-year-old Bourdin in aSan Antonio home, attending a San Antonio high school, living an assumed life.
The Imposter?s story is fantastic enough that even the straightest retelling would fascinate, but Layton?s approach makes a real onion out of it all, peeling back each layer to reveal a new one, each twist of the tale seemingly reshuffling the deck of our previous assumptions. There is something disturbing about the fact that someone like Bourdin managed to con high ranking officials in two first-world countries. But what proves more jaw-dropping is just how he was able to convince Nick?s family. Or did he? Did Bourdin pull the wool over the eyes of the Gibsons, or did the family convince themselves that a stranger was their son? Or did they role play along with Bourdin because they have secrets to hide? Or, do we have doubts about all of it because there is Bourdin, appearing on screen in the film in long sit-down interviews, planting the seeds of doubt in our minds, deceiving the movie?s audience just as he deceived the government officials and family of Nick Gibson?
In the end Layton doesn?t answer all of the questions raised by the film, possibly because they are unanswerable. Bourdin remains mystery, and we are left in doubt about what really happened to Nick, who is telling the truth, and who is guilty of what. But what is most unsettling about The Imposter is that it gets at something more fundamental, namely, the relationship between lies and personally identity, suggesting that reality itself is entity that remains ever-elusive.
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