THE “WORLD’S” OPINION – NOT TO BE MISSED
For twenty years, Sonia Kronlund’s name has been associated with the France Culture program “Les Pieds sur terre”, which, from Monday to Friday at lunchtime, broadcasts a report without comment. Twenty years that the producer has presented each episode in her patient and deep voice, as if emerging from the depths of the airwaves.
At the announcement of her new documentary, her fervent listeners will then be able to ask themselves a question: among the multitude of fascinating subjects and characters that she sees passing by, what makes one of them worthy of discussion? be made into a film?
The start of The Man of a Thousand Faces, which was first a book, gives us some answers: the journalist says that her love life was punctuated by encounters with mythomaniac and manipulative lovers. Moreover, his first documentary, Nothingwood (2017), followed Salim Shaheen, Afghan actor-producer-director, and unforgettable confabulator who augmented every moment of life with a little lie. The Man of a Thousand Facesit will be the dark side of the force, the story of a confabulator who does not intensify anything, but causes a lot of harm around him.
Sonia Kronlund investigated for five years the man we would call “Ricardo”, an extraordinary imposter who seduced countless women around the world, each time under a different identity. He calls himself Ricardo, Alexandre, Daniel or Richard. He is in turn a doctor, police officer, photographer, engineer. Said to be Brazilian, Portuguese or Argentinian. Gifted with a dizzying gift of ubiquity, the man managed to maintain several serious relationships at the same time, from Poland to Brazil, via France.
Masochism in love
Sonia Kronlund found Ricardo’s victims. Some testify openly, others are played by actresses (impossible, moreover, to disentangle the true from the false): women, no more gullible than others, who were in love, sometimes engaged, and did not never doubted that they shared their life with a man who had multiple companions and identities, and, above all, managed to never be unmasked. One of them remembers that Ricardo was angry at her for never coming to visit his workplace – if only she had agreed!
The Man of a Thousand Faces could have, in a tone marked by gravity, recounted the testimonies in front of the camera and the faces of the grieving victims. Instead, the film works on a form which, thanks to its permanent humor and its distance, gives it its restorative dimension: we discuss with a lawyer the risks induced by the diffusion of Ricardo’s face (reckless, Sonia Kronlund ends up show it), the women testify in a postcard Paris among lovebirds who kiss, definitively immune to any romantic illusion.
You have 43.66% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.