Emmanuelle Seigner in "The Witnesses"
- Running time:
- 115 minutes
- Cast:
- Michel Blanc -
- Adrien
- Emmanuelle Béart -
- Sarah
- Sami Bouajila -
- Mehdi
- Julie Depardieu -
- Julie
- Director:
- André Téchiné
- Genre:
- Drama
- Overall User Rating:
-
(0 ratings)
Spanning a year beginning in the summer of 1984, “The Witnesses” (“Les Temoins”) offers the considerable satisfaction of a beautifully acted ensemble piece built on the foundation of a serious subject—the dawn of the AIDS crisis—handled just so. A typical American studio treatment of the same story wouldn’t leave anything to chance, any rock of pathos unturned, any opportunity for Laughter and Tears and painful human drama unexploited.
“The Witnesses” may be schematic, but it lets each character live and breathe. The film captures a time and place that seems very distant now. Children’s book author Sarah, played by Emmanuelle Beart, has recently given birth. She is an uneasy new mother; she and her husband (Sami Bouajila), a Paris vice squad policeman, have an open-marriage agreement relatively free of angst, but the demands on Sarah’s time have played havoc on her concentration.
Life throws this couple a curve in the form of young Manu (Johan Libereau), the obsession of Sarah’s older friend Adrien, played by Michel Blanc. Part of director and co-writer Andre Techine’s picture unfolds by the sea, at the cottage owned by Sarah’s mother. There, after a near-drowning accident, Manu—a symbol of Eros, even though when Sarah tells him she’s writing a book on the subject, he says he “doesn’t know much about it”—ends up in a clinch with Sarah’s husband. It is the policeman’s first gay tryst, as well as the first liaison he keeps from his wife.
Before we see the first, mysterious lesions on Manu’s skin, the romantic entanglements and longings of “The Witnesses” belongs to the trappings of light comedy (though the film never seems callow). But we know what’s coming, and Techine respects both his characters and his audience. If the film is guilty of a certain degree of romanticism, the actors never beg for sympathy or attention or anything other than good, honest dramatic interest.
Blanc and Beart, two of the best-known faces of modern French cinema, delineate the ins and outs of any durable friendship with ease. Bouajila (playing the film’s most interesting contradiction) and Libereau (as the most sketchily drawn of the major characters) create a full, slippery relationship in a handful of scenes. Julie Depardieu portrays Manu’s opera singer sister, and her cloistered social life contrasts markedly with the raucous neighborhood in which she shares a tiny flat with her brother.
“You only live once, right?” Blanc’s character says in passing. It’s a bit of foreshadowing, but like everything else in “The Witnesses” it’s deftly handled. We know what’s coming before the people on the screen do. Techine’s graceful, forceful drama has the tact not to play narrative games with its subject.
mjphillips@tribune.com
