29 August, 2011

Based on a True Story of Impostors and Lies

I have written before about Frédéric Bourdin, the Frenchman who for several months successfully passed himself off as a kidnapped American teenager, living supposedly undetected with the boy's family. Yesterday I saw the feature film based on this story, The Chameleon, which was almost exactly what I would have expected based on the story I had already read. It raised all the same questions about this story that I've read (and asked)before: how on earth could an entire family mistake a 25-year-old Frenchman for their 16-year-old relative? If they couldn't, why were they pretending to? Whose lies were worse, the impostor's or his adopted family's?

I, like the film, am pretty certain that at least some members of Nicholas Barclay's family know what happened to him, but I was surprised to see this "review" on Netflix:
This movie is based on my family and is a far cry from the truth of what really happened. Based on real life??? Not really! My family is against this movie.

The review is not signed, so we have no way to know whether it was really written by a family member, but I wonder what parts the family member objected to most. Did Bourdin resemble Nick Barclay more than the film and news article suggest? Were the family's character flaws fabricated for entertainment purposes? Despite Netflix's description of the film, it was in no way a "thriller," and exhibited few characteristics of a typically highly manipulated "Based on a True Story" film. I'd love to know what its inaccuracies are; that knowledge might give this bizarre story some closure!
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2 comments:

  1. We are Thrice BookedAugust 29, 2011 at 1:42 PM

    There was a Law and Order based off of a story like this. A girl comes "home" pretending to be a kidnapped daughter. The family wanted it so badly to be true that they didn't say anything. Come to find out that their other daughter had killed the one whom they thought was missing. And they pretended this girl was their daughter so they didn't have to come to grips with the fact that the one daughter killed the other one. I don't remember what happened to the impostor...SO maybe THAT'S the "real" story ;)

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  2. LaraAugust 29, 2011 at 1:50 PM

    Well, I'm pretty sure Bourdin didn't kill anyone, but if you read the story, Barclay's brother (who is now dead himself from an overdose) quite possibly did kill him. I think I might have seen that Law and Order, or a similar one about a girl pretending to be in high school over and over again.

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