The Witnesses
Written by Laurent Guyont, André Téchiné and Viviane Zingg
Directed by André Téchiné
Strand Releasing
2008
Rating:


With the force and grandeur of the best novels of this young century, French director André Téchiné's "The Witnesses" delves into the lives of five Parisians who collide, befriend, love and grieve for each other over the course of one year. A work of romance and issue drama, the film encompasses the whole of the human experience with a dexterity and compassion comparable to Edward Yang's masterpiece "Yi Yi."

Fittingly, the film begins with a birth and ends with a death.

In 1984, children's author Sarah (Emmanuelle Béart) gives birth to a baby she views as more of an impediment to her writing than a child to love. Around the same time, young aspiring chef Manu (Johan Libereau) arrives in Paris to live with his sister Julie (Julie Depardieu), an opera singer who resides in a hotel that's largely a brothel. While cruising in a park frequented by gay men, Manu meets bald, aging Adrien (Michel Blanc). Adrien instantly falls in love with Manu and befriends the boy to keep him in his life knowing, as he's "a spell woven by Eros," Manu will never love him.

Adrien is friends with Sarah and takes Manu with him when Sarah invites him to her beach house with her husband Mehdi (Sami Bouajila), a vice detective of Algerian descent. One day, the homophobic Mehdi takes Manu swimming with him. Manu nearly drowns and Mehdi saves him, swimming the boy to shore and performing mouth-to-mouth on him. That act of rescue awakens surprising feelings in Mehdi. After that day on the beach, Mehdi befriends Manu and takes him for a ride in his plane. Afterwards, Mehdi and Manu begin their affair by making love beneath the trees in a field. Adrien is furious about the affair, but his rage turns to fear when he discovers a lesion on Manu's chest.

From there the light, brisk ensemble romance transforms into an AIDS drama, but not the kind familiar to American audiences expecting life lessons and morally centered characters. These aren't characters with squared, simplistic natures. The characters rage and hurt, but they're also hypocrites. Mehdi continues to support his department's crackdown on gay clubs as part of an effort to stop the "plague." Adrien becomes one of the leading doctors in the search for a cure and takes Manu into his home, but, out of jealousy, he refuses to let Mehdi see the boy he once loved. Sarah sees the importance of bearing witness to Manu's sickness, yet there's also something opportunistic about her profiting from it. But in the end, Sarah's novel (and Julie's performance in "The Marriage of Figaro" and Adrien's research) gives the film a bookend birth in the act of creation.

Téchiné also consistently refuses to indulge in the histrionics typically associated with AIDS movies. The big moments here are smaller in scale, their profundity astonishing because of their simplicity. The images of Sarah hunched over her red typewriter, Adrien holding Manu's jacket while Manu goes into the woods for a four-way, Manu watching a prostitute dance, Mehdi watching Manu's clothes in the dryer, Manu's kiss to Sarah – all are small, breathtaking pieces in Téchiné's generous mosaic.

"The Witnesses" isn't a dour film; heartbreaking, yes, but never grim. Ultimately, it's a work of life affirmation. "The Witnesses" is a reminder that all anyone gets is a lifetime, and what one does with it is what determines its worth.

Posted Saturday, February 2, 2008

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