THE IMPOSTER

This is the implausible true story about a young dark French man passing himself off as a blond American teenager who had been missing for some years. I actually remember reading this story in The New Yorker a while back and was flabbergasted then, but now seeing the whole scenario skillfully re-enacted on the big screen, I still have trouble believing it is true.

Essentially a 23-year man gets picked up by the Police in the South of France pretending to be a teenager so that they will have to put him a nice comfortable children’s home.  He acts dumb refusing to talk but eventually knows he must say something before they suss out that he is actually a petty criminal and wanted by Interpol. He tells the Social Worker that he is an American and that he had run away from home and then was abducted and bought to France against his will.  He persuades them to allow him to phone his parents himself and because of the time difference they let him stay in the Office one night to make the call.  What he does in fact is phone several Police Depts. in the US pretending to be a French police officer who is from the Precinct where they are holding a young boy who they want to identify. This clever ruse results in getting details on a 14 year old who has been missing from his home in rural Texas for 4 years.  When the US Missing Persons Office fax over the details of Nicholas Barclay, it’s very obvious that he looks nothing like the kid at all, but he goes ahead planning to steal his identity anyway.

The absolutely ridiculous thing is that he actually gets away with it.  To cut a very long story short he fools the boy’s sister and mother and (almost) his entire family back in Texas and gets accepted in the community as Nicholas who everyone is led to believe was tortured and abused and never allowed to speak English ….. hence his foreign accent now.

This detailed reconstruction has lengthy interviews with ‘Nicholas’ and his family, which even suspend disbelief, and even when the impersonation is eventually discovered, it is still hard to imagine that he could have fooled so many people.  There are suggestions that turn into unproven accusations that the reason the family accepted the man so readily as one of their own is that they had actually killed the real Nicholas, and having the substitute around let them off the hook.  We will never know.  But is a preposterous story made that much more fascinating now it has been filmed very imaginative by documentarian Bert Layton.

Suspend your disbelief and be thoroughly entertained.