A newspaper correspondent from Girona is captivated by the incredible story of Frédéric Bourdin, ‘the chameleon’, a 31-year-old wandering liar obsessed with slipping into the skin of missing children in order to be taken in by centres for children in care. Bourdin, on file with police forces across Europe, hit the headlines when he was sentenced to 6 years in prison for impersonating, for 4 months, the missing child of an American family. The journalist begins a gripping investigation, with valuable revelations, that leads the viewer to this tortured, elusive character. Frédéric B., an entirely true documentary with the air of film noir, begins like François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, with a boy telling his class the lie that his mother has died, and threatens to end like Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou, with its protagonist wrapped in dynamite, about to blow himself up.
