(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 September - work in progress
* Contains spoilers - either resolve to know all about The Imposter (2012), or do not read *
It's a bit like odd one out (a game whose title has singularly always baffled me), or is it?
Well, we could play it with this film and others such as Zelig (1983), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), The Return of Martin Guerre (1982), maybe even with Roxanne (1987), and other media such as The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (with the late and great Leonard Rossiter, 1976), and Orson Welles and his broadcast of The War of the Worlds :
(1) If you watch The Imposter and think that it is a documentary, then you are more gullible than even Welles conceived in around 1938 - it is not a documentary, and you can simply look at the credits to see so, if nothing else convinces you*.
Is it, then, (2) a well-done feature film, or, as I say, (3) a piss-take, which is funny, but whose purpose is unclear. It's unclear, but I'd be amazed if the person with the germ of the concept hadn't been influenced by something akin to the novel Engleby by Sebastian Faulks**. I still question, though, what the genre is, and who's deceiving whom and why?
It is, for me, as if Airplane passed itself for a flight-related real-life drama, in the way that Casualty does as events taking place in a hospital (not a vehicle for characters to interact concerning health-type excuses for action) : speak to anyone who thinks that they know about criminal or civil courts and how they operate, and you infer (they were never a witness or juror, never attended a trial at all), and it's all sucked in from t.v. and film, whereas the truth of the justice system is dry and dull, let alone how it operates.
OK so far? What I propound, then, is that just as you might be able to watch This is Spinal Tap (1984) or anything to do with Steve Coogan / Barry Humphreys / Sasha Baron Cohen / Matt Roper and their other selves, and believe, as at (1), that it's all real, you would then be a more-or-less willing victim (and you'd have lost a lot of money to that nice man in Nigeria). In other words, the equivalent of our hero in The Truman Show*** (1998).
I have Tweeted already about the Hitler diaries, but not, I think, alluded to Trevor, Lord Roper : I believe that it was claimed, when it was revealed that the diaries whose status he had approved were shown to be fakes, that so much should have been self-evident, and, with The Imposter, I cannot believe, dedicated popcorn-eating or using the cinema as a more effective bed apart, that anyone would take it for real (item (1), above), or that it was pretending to be real (item (2), above). For, here, we are not talking about Homer napping, as the phrase has it for when The Odyssey or The Iliad creak a bit too much.
Perhaps, though, the film (any film?) itself acts as a soporific for the higher functions of the brain for some, However, its score, for example, I found so intrusive that it was not good film music (of which, I fully believe, that one should laregly cosnciously be unaware, unless it is some big emotional theme, as in Superman (1978), or its reprise), but, again, I do believe that there was some of that Damien-Hirst-like post-modern irony lurking here: with passages that played with the in any case edgy interval of a semi-tone, as if a restless oscillation between neighbouring pitches could be remotely undetectable, or contained not the development of thematic material, but which just enacted descending scales, how could I have expected to acclimatize to them? - and I do not believe that, unless it was a joke at the expense of those who did, I was meant to.
That said, the friend with whom I saw the film has alerted me to the existence of both:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4087370.stm
as well as
http://www.find-anyone.com/aboutcharlieparker.html
From the first, I quote (sceptically) where the reviewer (Geoffrey MacNab) talks of the task faced by The Imposter's director, Bart Layton: Like [Frédéric] Bourdin, he withholds information from us or gives it us to us in such a selective fashion that we can't see the holes. No holes detected in my viewing, as you can see from the end-notes...!
In the second, Francisco Hernandez-Fernandez is supposed to have been used as an alias by the real Bourdin - yes, a very likely name to choose, like Franco del Bobbo! This was at a school that he attended until 'A teacher unmasked him last week [seemingly June 2005] after having watched a television programme about his exploits'.
Yet, at this date, after allegedly being imprisoned in the States for six year following impersonating Nicholas Barclay and having been found wanted, the piece lamely states:
He is said to have assumed numerous other identities
No facts there, then?
Just look at http://imposterfilm.com/interview-subjects/, and see whether there is a closer resemblance to something like (which I hope that you know isn't real) The Addams Family and to the people who might, in character, be playing such a thing - the poses, the expressions, don't they challenge you not to take it seriously?
From Wikipedia: Frédéric Bourdin is a French serial impostor the press has nicknamed "The Chameleon". He began his impersonations as a child and as of 2005 had assumed at least 500 false identities, three of which have been actual teenage missing persons.
More to come...
End-notes
* An appendix can be found at ??, but how about :
The charges for which Frederic is put away for six years (perjury and falsely obtaining a passport) - as if he could not have been found to have committed offences that would have justified and carried a much longer tariff, but he needs to be free to tell the story
The calls to everywhere and anywhere, permitted by the prison to a man whose falsehood from making the calls near the beginning of this story must have been discovered - but he is supposedly released, and without any continuing restriction on his activities (wherever he may then be, as he would assuredly have been deported
The ludicrously lengthy list of 'previous' when Frederic is caught in the events in this film, both as if he would somehow have avoided being put away for repeatedly committing deception all around Europe, and not have been a person under restriction then for his pattern of crime, with all children's homes on alert to him and to his modus operandi
That list even contains (shown on the screen) the name Fernandez Fernandez, and the film revels in its absurdity, aurally and visually - I was in hoots, and my friend was laughing, but, bewilderingly, everyone else in the screen seemed to have taken it as indicative of how bad he was, not of sheer implausibility
** First published by Hutchinson in 2007 (3 May).
*** If the film were really about that : Tru + Man?, and his surname is, of course, Burbank (Truman is his Christian name, as we often forget), a real 'studio man'. Thinking about The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) may not be amiss.
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