Film Analysis - Week 33 - The Imposter (2012)

Film Analysis - Week 33

The Imposter (2012) - Directed by Bart Layton

Starring: Adama O'Brian, Nicholas Barclay and Carey Gibson

This film is a documentary centred on the disappearance of Nicholas Barclay and the affect that his life has on his family and others after his disappearance. The filmmakers saw this story and decided to analyse it by taking it further. The film is a series of recreations of events, interviews and theories. The filmmakers realised early on that there was a hidden story amongst this and that it needed to be publicised. Accurate to the true story, this film doesn’t pick a side; it doesn’t aim the affection at the protagonist Frédéric Bourdin but it also doesn’t paint him as the ‘bad-guy’. The information given in this film is neutral and doesn’t take sides towards either the family or Bourdin. This allows the audience to make their own decisions and to decipher what the film is trying to say themselves. The film explores themes of grievance, lying, deceiving, manipulation and exploitation.

In order to truly tell the story of these characters and the way that it played out, the filmmakers had to interview the real people involved. However to give this a more entertaining twist they used recreations of each scene using real actors in combination with found footage in order to tell the story accurately. The film’s vision of what actually happened positions the audience in a way to feel empathetic towards Bourdin and his motives for each action. If someone were to hear about the film’s story through a news outlet, the only focus would be that Bourdin lied to and manipulated an ‘innocent family’. The filmmakers play with this mechanic by letting Bourdin tell his own story about why he would take over the life of Nicholas Barclay. The desperation and other emotive expression he expresses are in order to make the audience feel comfortable with him. This is a great parallel with the end of the film in which it is revealed that he has taken the identity of many others before. The film operates in a very unpredictable way, occasionally dropping bombs of information on the audience, surprising them with new information that completely changes the perspective. Once we learn the cruelty of Bourdin’s actions, we immediately are flipped on our head by learning of what might have actually happened to Nicholas Barclay. This format and structure for the film enables the filmmakers to appropriately time and space out the film’s message. It build up each character with their own malicious intentions and desires with the audience realising it, this finally leads up to the climatic conclusion of mystery, giving the audience a chance to speculate.

The film’s most cinematographically heavy sections are the recreations, in which actors portray the true scenarios and even some made up ones in order to give the audience a visual representation of the events that supposedly took place for the characters prior to the making of the documentary. This are very vivid and act almost like drama’s by using wide angle shots of a location in order to give the audience a perspective into the setting of the dramatization. Extra effort was put in by the filmmakers to make these segments look appealing, each shot it colour graded in order to make it look almost unreal and therefore to allow the audience to more clearly distinguish between the real life segments and the dramatizations’. This is clever and unique and gives each scene a more vibrant and appealing look, a tactic to keep the audiences intrigued and in awe.