How does it begin, what is or is not happening in the head of a liar to be led to say what is not? Is it the taste for play, for provocation, for danger, the expression of a desire or the fear of boredom? And what is stopping him from understanding, once he has let go of the big lie, that he will have to invent another to cover up the previous one? What’s wrong with him, really? What did she do to him? Is he distressed by the situation he has created or is it his lack of morality that allows him to create a new lie? At what point does he stop being aware that he is lying, to believe his lie and defend it tooth and nail?
To all these essential questions, Sonia Kronlund, the director of the thrilling and tragicomic documentary The Man of a Thousand Faces, responds only fleetingly, when she tells us that Ricardo, the liar in her film, is the son of a woman who had a twin sister. The psychoanalytic path is open, it could lead to the fantasy of the evil double. Fortunately, the director does not take this route. And as we know her through her radio broadcasts, Feet on the ground (France culture), we are not surprised to see her avoid the trap. She has interviewed hundreds of social cases for twenty years, she has acquired unique experience in the field of human psychology… But not to the point of knowing it, and avoiding being fooled. Journalists are like doctors and shoemakers, the most poorly prepared for life’s unexpected events. She informs us from the outset in her film, in her love life she would have only met bullshitters. To the point of thinking that she was made for this. She says a little more in her story published by Grasset at the beginning of the year, which tells almost the same story and which is also called The Man of a Thousand Faces. But having read it doesn’t spoil the pleasure of seeing the film.
Very quickly, the director abandons introspection, she is not Christine Angot, and rather than trying to understand what is wrong with her when it comes to guys, she decides to take one, a prototypical liar, and track him down. It falls, not entirely by chance, on Ricardo, a sort of Kylian Mbappé of confusion, doubled as a chameleon. Sonia Kronlund interviews the five women that Ricardo seduced with his lies, five very different women who describe a five times very different Ricardo. He’s a placid lazy person, overactive and anxious, a military doctor, a car salesman, he was born in Brazil or Argentina, he flirts, flirts, gets in trouble, borrows money from one to repay the other , he has two or three wives in France, one in Poland, successively or simultaneously. He abandons the one he got pregnant, sends his mother photos of himself with his so-called baby who is actually the neighbors’ baby. A genius, I tell you.
What happens to Ricardo?
On her sexual performances, Sonia Kronlund does not obtain much information from her victims, except from the first, a Brazilian woman of 1.90 meters, it is one of the nice surprises of the film, and adds a new facet to this facetious ball of Ricardo. I’ll leave you the pleasure of discovering it. Be aware, however, that Sonia Kronlund manages to locate Ricardo, and that she will in turn have to invent a huge hoax to trap him. Another movie could start from there. A legal film where we know what happens to Ricardo once he is unmasked.
In the meantime, you can watch again on Netflix The Art of Lyinga film by Bill Condon, made in 2019, or on the same subject, still on Netflix, the eight episodes of the series Ripleythey will make you regret it Full sun by Clément (1960) and the casting of Talented Mister Ripley (1999). When there are as many adaptations of Patricia Highsmith’s book as there are women bamboozled by Ricardo, we will, I fear, still not have answered the questions I asked at the beginning.
Christophe Donner, writer.
.