29/09/12……Imposter coming to Thame Cinema

THAME CINEMA will be showing THE IMPOSTER on Saturday, September 29, 2012 – UK 2012, 95 minutes, 15 certificate, Directed by Bart Layton, Starring Adam O’Brian, Alan Teichman, Anna Ruben, Cathy Dresbach.

Fakes imposters and con artists have long entertained us in fact and in fiction, and have proved an irresistible subject for the movies. Think of Gerard Depardieu in The Return of Martin Guerre, a man who returns to his village in medieval France having been long presumed dead in a prolonged war. The story was remade as Somersby, with Richard Gere as another man apparently returning from the dead this time in the wake of the American civil war.

There are the dazzling exploits of Frank Abagnale, played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Catch Me If You Can, who engineered a glamorous career as pilot, paediatrician and lawyer all on the back of his skills in forgery. Or David Hampton who passed himself off as Sidney Poitier?s son and charmed his way into the liberal mega-rich elite, and whose story was told in Six Degrees of Separation with Will Smith in the starring role.

There is a compelling duality in such narratives: on the one hand the brazen and often dangerously charismatic chutzpah of the imposter; on the other the desperately humiliating and painful betrayal of those who are taken in, often out of a desperate need to believe ? and often with a staggering willingness to deceive themselves. This astonishing British documentary tells the story of French con man Fr