There are some jaw-dropping moments in this story of a man who conned numerous women, but this quietly lo-thrills documentary lets the victims tell their stories

‘When he said he was in Toulouse for paediatric training, he was in Krakow seeing his other wife.” This is the moment when a Parisian woman called Marianne discovered that her partner had a second life. And a third, and a fourth … The Man With a Thousand Faces slots neatly into the mini-genre of dating scammer documentaries – but this is the French-intellectual version. There are some jaw-droppers in the story of how Ricardo (sometimes Alexandre or Daniel), a Portuguese (sometimes Argentinian or Brazilian) man conned numerous women. But it’s an emotionally literate, lo-thrills film from film-maker Sonia Kronlund, who casts actors to play some of the women to protect their privacy.

And really, it’s the women that Kronlund finds compelling. Marianne (played by Aurelie Gasche) had a baby with Ricardo, supposedly a surgeon who’d spent years in Africa with Médecins Sans Frontières. She was five months pregnant when suddenly she couldn’t reach him; the phone numbers he’d given her were fake. Another woman discovered the truth after finding a photo that he’d sent to the mother of his baby daughter – only they didn’t have a baby. Ricardo’s typical exit strategy at the end of a relationship was to vanish after getting a phone call to say that one of his parents was dead or in a coma.