Reviews and notes

Festivals:
2007 Berlin, Wellington


French writer/director Andre Techine revisits the onset of the AIDS epidemic in mid-1980s Paris, with this compelling account of the impact made by a young man Manu (Johan Libereau), on the lives of police lieutenant Mehdi (Sami Bouajila), novelist Sara (Emmanuelle Beart), and their doctor friend Adrien (Michel Blanc). Fast-paced and impressively acted by its ensemble cast, THE WITNESSES acknowledges the reality of untimely death and celebrates the "miracle of being alive."
- Thomas Dawson, BBC, 06 October 2007.


The French director André Téchiné is a master at evoking personality quirks, the unpredictability of relationships and the haphazard way love affairs, friendships and social groups form and dissolve. Many of his films, like Changing Times and Wild Reeds, portray a multicultural environment in which French and North African characters mingle, sometimes uneasily.

His films are also casually sensual. The fluid sexuality of at least one male character in most Téchiné films is almost a given; the director’s strong, free-spirited women are in charge of their own sexuality to a degree rarely found in American movies, unless those women are designated as vixens. But if the world according to Téchiné is a liberated wonderland with few boundaries, living there comfortably requires that you wear sophisticated psychological armor.

THE WITNESSES, set in 1984, observes this wonderland shocked out of its complacency by the arrival of AIDS. Suddenly a closely knit group of friends — straight, gay and bisexual — is forced to confront the uncertainties and terrors of the epidemic in its early days. It is imperative that they disclose their discreetly kept sexual secrets and report their HIV status.

This story of paradise lost begins with a domestic spat in the Paris residence of a handsome couple: Sarah (Emmanuelle Béart), a well-to-do writer of children’s books, and her working-class husband, Mehdi (Sami Bouajila), a hard-nosed police inspector of North African descent. Mehdi is outraged at Sarah’s indifference to their newborn baby, whose cries she tunes out with earplugs while she works. Sarah and Mehdi have a pact: both are allowed to take outside lovers in a "don’t ask, don’t tell" arrangement that seems to work, although it is not without its subliminal tensions.

Meanwhile, Sarah’s close friend Adrien (Michel Blanc), a homely, middle-aged gay doctor, prowls a popular cruising ground, where he meets Manu (Johan Libéreau), an arrogant young man who refuses to sleep with him but agrees to be his companion and his student of life’s finer things. Wildly in love with his shallow, narcissistic protégé, Adrien is shrewd enough not to push too hard, but there is an element of masochism in his abject devotion.

Manu, fresh from the provinces, shares space with his sister Julie (Julie Depardieu), an aspiring opera singer, in a cheap hotel that is a center of prostitution under scrutiny by Mehdi, who leads the police force’s vice division. But Mehdi, off duty, is not as rigid as he appears...

This beautifully acted ensemble film, which uses recurrent images of water and aviation, unfolds in three chapters. The first remembers the heady pre-AIDS era. The second observes the foursome’s reactions to the crisis, which for each is a test of character and of the strength of bonds they have taken for granted. In the third, those who remain pick up the pieces and go on.

THE WITNESSES sidesteps most of its opportunities for high drama, political sermonizing and the jerking of tears. Mr. Téchiné, working from a screenplay he wrote with Laurent Guyot and Viviane Zingg, refuses to pigeonhole his characters in comfortable niches or ethical positions. The film skips ahead with the pace of a light romantic comedy, rarely lingering long enough on a scene to conjure melodrama.

The heaviest moment is a bitter argument between Mehdi and Adrien in which the policeman accuses the doctor, now a leader in the fight against AIDS, of being jealous of his affair with Manu and of basking in his role of noble crusader and medical know-it-all. Adrien fires back that Mehdi, in his reluctance to get an AIDS test and to tell Sarah about the affair, is a selfish coward. Each is only half right.

When Sarah is eventually informed of the affair, her curiosity about its details becomes obsessive, and she begins writing an adult novel based on the dying Manu’s AIDS journal.

But Mr. Téchiné refuses to pass moral judgment on any human behavior pertaining to love and desire. His recognition that these things are transient and constantly changing frees him to take a longer view.
- Stephen Holden, The New York Times, 1 February 2008.

Weblink: A Review by David Wiegand, San Francisco Chronicle

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