The Man with a Thousand Faces (L’homme aux Mille Visages) is not to be confused with the Lon Chaney bio-pic. This French documentary blends reality and reenactments into a kind of detective story. First produced as a podcast, and then as a book, director and producer Sonia Kronlund’s first-person quest follows her investigation of a man who managed to have simultaneous relationships with numerous women across the globe. He lived with several, often claiming that his job required a lot of traveling. In one case, he fathered a child. Among other fabrications, he claimed to be a surgeon, a Peugeot engineer, and that he was raised in Argentina, sometimes in Brazil. He went by the names Alexandre, Ricardo and Daniel, inventing entire family histories and backgrounds. Effortlessly changing personalities to charm each of his victims, the chameleon romances the women and hustles their money. With the help of the director and a hired detective, four of the women who were fooled into relationships set out on a quest to expose the imposter. Initially, the film blots out the man’s face in photographs. Once it is discovered he has been using a Face Swap application to create different identities — and after checking the legalities of publicly exposing the guy — his real identity is revealed. The hunt then intensifies. The women preferred to remain anonymous; they permitted themselves to be portrayed by professional actors. The result is an ingeniously layered hybrid of performance and documentary — a fascinating psychological and forensic investigation into duplicity and identity in our age of virtual realities.
