Film REVIEWS
DOCUMENTARY THE IMPOSTER (15) 99min ●●●●● That truth can be a stranger beast than fiction is a maxim quoted to death with regard to documentaries, but Bart Layton’s punchy take on a tangled and troubling 90s news story really rams the point home. The bizarre decisions these characters make, the ludicrous risks they take and the wilful self-delusion that all or some of them are practising would never survive to the end of a script meeting. A black-stubbled, brown-eyed, twentysomething, French-speaking drifter wouldn’t attempt to pass himself off as a blond, blue-eyed American boy missing for three years. The lost boy’s family wouldn’t accept him and take him in. The police wouldn’t be fooled; certainly not the FBI . . . Yet Frédéric Bourdin was accepted by the family of Nicholas
Barclay, and lived among them, even as the black roots grew into his dyed blond hair.
Layton lets this charismatic monster talk directly to the camera about his side of the scam, a technique that lets us experience his extra- ordinary persuasiveness, but also reveals his scary absence of compas- sion. At no point does he betray any awareness that his actions might have been cruel: while deep emotional trauma must – as he claims – lie behind his actions, he relates the whole thing as if it were a daring lark.
The film sometimes errs on the overly playful side: the intermittent comic interludes and macabre closing set piece seem a little vulgar when you recall that we are still talking about a lost and probably murdered child. Still, the story is gripping, and the film leaves enough questions in its wake for fertile post-screening debate. (Hannah McGill) ■ Selected release from Fri 24 Aug.
DRAMA LAWLESS (18) 115min ●●●●● DRAMA THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO (cert tbc) 107min ●●●●●
John Hillcoat and Nick Cave re-team after gritty Aussie western The Proposition for Lawless, another tale of strong-willed men living in a period of violence and uncertainty. This time round, the action takes place in prohibition-era America, specifically the moonshine-soaked mountains of Franklin County, Virginia. Jack Bondurant (Shia LaBeouf) makes a living brewing and smuggling liquor with his brothers Forrest (Tom Hardy) and Howard (Jason Clarke). Their easy-going relationship with the local law comes to an abrupt end with the appointment of vicious enforcer Charlie Rakes (Guy Pearce).
Cave’s decade-spanning screenplay ticks by at a fair pace, punctuated by bursts of extreme and bloody violence. Hardy and Pearce turn in powerhouse performances, but it’s left to LaBeouf to carry the main weight of the story, and as such your enjoyment of the film will depend on whether you find his brand of wide-eyed earnestness endearing or irritating. Certainly, his role as the less stoic brother is a necessary counterpoint to Hardy’s mountainous immovability, but his place in the story mimics his place in the cast: trying his darndest, but unable to match his peers. (Niki Boyle) ■ General release from Fri 7 Sep.
Having taken a break from his usual milieu with his previous film, the French Resistance thriller The Army of Crime, France’s answer to Ken Loach, Robert Guédiguian, is back on his home-turf with another tough-minded but warm- hearted story set among the working class of modern-day Marseille. Michel and Marie-Claire (beautifully played by Guédiguian regulars Jean-Pierre Darroussin and Ariane Ascaride) are a pair of former political activists who have been happily married for 30 years. Having made himself redundant during the latest round of lay-offs at the docks at which he worked, Michel settles into early retirement. Their happiness is brought to an abrupt halt, however, when they become the victims of a violent robbery. In the aftermath of the horrific event, Michel and Marie-Claire learn that one of the assailants was a fellow dockworker who was also laid off. Faced with these revelations, Michel and Marie-Claire find themselves in a moral dilemma in which their socialist beliefs clash with their bourgeois life. Guédiguian uses this dramatic crisis to interrogate the difference between having principles and taking action, and how the one becomes easier, the other harder as we get older. Provocative stuff. (Miles Fielder) ■ Selected release from Fri 14 Sep.
54 THE LIST 23 Aug–20 Sep 2012