Streaming on Max, the series tells the story of woman who lies to a grief support group about her connection to the Paris terrorist attacks of 2015.
The four-part French mini-series “The Confidante,” beginning Friday, on Max (in French, with subtitles), is based loosely on a true story and follows a woman named Chris (Laure Calamy), who claims falsely that her best friend was a victim of the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris. Chris ingratiates herself into a survivors’ support network, providing real time and energy but also catfishing other members and committing fraud. She posts constantly on Facebook, offering herself as a shoulder to cry on, fielding texts, chats and calls from bereaved, traumatized — legitimate — victims.
“Confidante” keeps its focus tight, with only slivers of Chris’s previous grifts creeping into the narrative — just enough to feel like half remembered rumors. We see Chris’s pain and vulnerability, the shabby ways some people treat her. And we also see her shamelessly scam cabdrivers and bartenders.
In one of the show’s knottiest, most striking scenes, members of the support group join Chris at the hospital to visit “Vincent,” her comatose friend. They promise an unconscious Vincent that they care about him, they’re waiting for him. We, and Chris, know the man in the bed is not Vincent but rather a random victim whose room she weaseled into weeks earlier. What does one make of a misdirected vigil?
Chris often blasts music on her headphones, which we hear in tinny second hand. A man sighs that everyone in Paris is connected to a victim somehow, given the scale of the attack. Another man, whose wife survived the attack, describes the second-degree trauma he and his son experience from watching her suffer. “Confidante” layers these moments carefully to build Chris’s psyche: Just because you’re not wearing the headphones doesn’t mean you can’t hear the music, right? Just because it didn’t happen to Chris the way she said doesn’t mean it didn’t happen in the broader sense, right? … Right?
Well, no, of course not. “Confidante” subtly, effectively depicts how a fraud turns everything inside out. What seemed like generosity was selfishness. What seemed like support was damage.
“The Confidante” kicks off a little social fraud boomlet in the coming days: “Anatomy of Lies,” “Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare” and “Scamanda” all premiere next week, and all follow outrageous, compounding scams. Those are all documentaries, and what a fictionalized drama can offer that ripped-from-the-podcast docs can’t is a real evocation of the present tense, the part before ruefulness, the part where it all feels true.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
