Friday Film #3

The Imposter aired on channel 4 last night, and I know I was part of a large audience which will have seen it. I rarely watch whole films on live TV but I'd had this on my watchlist for a while so sat down with some friends. The opening is a quick relay of events which show how the imposter convinced the family he was their missing son, retold through fuzzy phone calls starting with one from a phone booth in Spain. The imposter describes how he executed the fake call in order to get put in a children's home, where he felt he would be cared for, something he had not experienced in the real world. The ad break brought welcome space for an omg and then the story carried on, unfurling more and more bizarre events as the imposter is flown over to the US and accepted as the missing child by the family, until we're almost questioning whose side were on (but not quite) with the final revelation that the family may have known all along that the 23 year old Frenchman, Frederic, was an imposter. Both sides of the events are tragic, but I doubt many would have continued to sympathise with the grown man once it is revealed that he is now married with 3 children of his own. This film is an incredible story, and the usually inexcusable flaws in a mystery like this only add to its overall impression as a perplexing account to watch. It doesn't matter how so many people can mistake a 23 year old for a 16 year old because it actually happened. The vulnerability of the family is sometimes hard to accept when they're behaving so unbelievably from our point of view, as they constantly seem to convince themselves that their son is really back. The conclusion leaves us with an undecided case of what happens to the real kid while the incredibly blaze imposter/narrator appears dancing to Michael Jackson in a cell. An enjoyable watch despite the heavy content and a great film for C4 as the difficulties many will have found in the chilling account will be retold around the country today as they were on twitter.