The missing person

Cheekily edited, brilliantly structured, manipulative in the best sense of the word, Bart Layton’s The Imposter is a true crime documentary that unearths a high profile, already well-examined case of identity theft and somehow manages to render it only more mysterious, more generative of questions. And its questions are haunting, burgeoning in your mind as you go over the facts—or lack thereof. A boy disappears, leaving a black hole in a family; someone comes along to fill that hole, and that someone, against all common sense, is embraced by the family. Some kind of exchange appears to have taken place. A tacit agreement perhaps. It only falls apart when the outside world forces the issue, and then the tacit agreement becomes a crime, a violation, an outrage. At least, that’s one reading of the events chronicled in The Imposter. One of many.

The film’s antihero—or, if you’d prefer, its villain that we’re led to identify with—is serial impostor Frédéric Bourdin. Layton has told his story so that it’s Bourdin we trust, because Bourdin’s been caught, over and over, and speaks openly about his various deceptions. He’s got nothing to lose. While the film’s ostensible victims, excessively naïve, in some cases zombified, seem anything but credible. The bizarre, sensational story, if you missed it during its 15 minutes back in the late 1990s, goes like this: 12-year-old Texan Nicholas Barclay goes missing in 1994. Three years and four months later someone is found in a phone booth in Spain, is taken into custody, and some time later this someone claims to be Barlcay. Carey Gibson, Barclay’s older sister, flies to Spain and, as promptly as legalities allow, takes Barclay home and reintegrates him into her extended family and community. But this Barclay, who was blonde, blue-eyed, born and raised American and only 16 years old, was, we now know, 23, Franco-Algerian, of dark features and hair, and could barely speak English, and when he did speak had a heavy accent. What is going on here? After watching The Imposter I kept thinking about the moment when Gibson and Bourdin first meet. Bourdin claims that Gibson showed him family photos, told him who everyone was, essentially began crash-coaching him in becoming her little brother. Did she have something to hide? Did she just need to have her brother back so desperately that she would willingly accept a substitute?

Bourdin: “I wanted to be someone else. Someone who was acceptable.”

Barclay’s mother: “My goal in life was not to think.”

Crafting a deft braid of reenactments and interviews that owe something to the films of Errol Morris—another filmmaker obsessed with uncertainty—Layton’s narrative builds slowly toward its larger ambiguities. The last act, which introduces us to a wily detective named Charlie Parker, who proves Bourdin’s ruse by way of studying his ears, is as engrossing anything you’ll see on a screen this year, featuring developments that, if you’re not familiar with them, I won’t spoil. Of course the film will leave you wanting more, much more. I keep thinking how much this story deserves a great writer to give us an exhaustive investigative, book-length essay, something as much about psychology, about need and grief, about secret violence and secret contracts, as it is about crimes and disguises and con artists. But The Imposter works beautifully as a lyrical, very cinematic introduction to this deeply strange story. 

     

3 Women: Altman's puzzling, oneiric, flawed masterpiece

Sometime in 1977, while his wife was frighteningly ill and in hospital, Robert Altman went home to get some much-needed sleep and literally dreamed of his next movie. All he knew was that it would be set in a desert, have something to do with identity theft, star Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek, and be called 3 Women. Those were the days before Altman’s commercial cred was lost, M*A*S*H and Nashville were still fresh victories, and all Altman had to do was stop by the 20th Century Fox studios on his way to the airport, throw his skeleton of a pitch at Alan Ladd Jr. and within minutes he had a picture deal. He didn’t even miss his flight.

3 Women is an enigmatic jewel from that magic period of freedom for Altman. His dream infused the film not only with raw materials of cast, theme and setting, but with a strange atmosphere of aquatic veils, exaggerated colours, a weird dialogue of opacity and transparency through steam, reflections, shadows and rising heat. Yet it also delved into a small, isolated pocket of the US swathed with a loneliness and frailty amidst dusty kitsch Americana (mini-golf, shooting ranges and dirt bikes) and superficiality. It’s perplexing as all hell, and I’m not certain it ever quite reaches the full circle it strives for, but it makes as crystalline and lasting an impression as anything Altman’s ever done.

The first moments are transporting: A woman painting a mural is seen through a tumbling aquarium. And then we see an indoor pool, following elephantine legs which intermingle with more aged torsos walking and wading. Gerald Busby’s atonal score heightens the slightly alien aura. The pool is a spa for the elderly and infirm, a place where young women gently guide patients through simple exercises. The spa’s model employee is Millie (Duvall), an oddly beautiful and utterly by-the-book young woman possessing a certain women’s magazine glamour. We meet Millie as she trains Pinky (Spacek), a new employee who seems even younger, eager though mischievous. “You’re a little like me, aren’t you?” Millie says to Pinky at one point, and Pinky takes the comment to heart: what immediately begins between the two women is hard to put your finger on, but it’s as though Pinky initially exists devoid of some essence of personality, and her hero worship of Millie becomes something both more profound and sinister.

For all its emphasis on theme, ambiguity and aesthetic, refined performances are crucial to 3 Women. Duvall is simultaneously beguiling and pathetic as Millie, nurturing her attractiveness yet living in a virtual vacuum of human affection, and the magic of her performance is partially attributable to the fact that she practically invented her character, writing the diaries we hear her read, the shopping lists and recipes (Duvall even bought the groceries to make Millie’s ridiculous cheese spray hors d’oeurves). And Spacek transforms so seamlessly in the film’s second half of metaphysics and narrative leaps, going from child to temperamental seductress and back to child again. As well, both are funny, wearing their characters’ abundant eccentricities as though they were totally normal.

3 Women clearly owes something to Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, but it lives in its own separate world with its own psychic implications. Everything in 3 Women conspires to some larger, unspoken event: the Bohdi Wind murals of sexual monsters painted in empty swimming pools by Willie (Janice Rule), the third woman of the title; the snobbish twins at the spa who seem content to communicate only with each other; the appearance of an elderly couple who may or may not be Pinky’s parents but who haunt Millie with their otherness and repellent age. What does it all mean? The good news is that the audio commentary Altman provided for Criterion's DVD release a few years back is often illuminating without ever trying to explain it all. The rest is up to us.