The Witnesses (2008)

Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

Just what I expected

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Les Témoins (The Witnesses) is another fine artwork by French director André Téchiné that continues to examine relationships in times of stress and through areas of rough travel. As written by Téchiné, Laurent Guyot, and Viviane Zingg this film is a love story and a social commentary on life in 1984 when AIDS raised its ugly head and disrupted lives, hopes and relationships. What could have been a heavy-handed woeful tale is instead a story about ordinary people and how the spectre of the then 'new disease' affected a small group of friends. In the intimacy of the story there is an opportunity to reflect and to see more clearly the atmosphere of that time in history. Sarah (Emmanuelle Béart) is a writer of children's books married to Mehdi (Sami Bouajila), a member of the Paris police force vice squad. They have an open marriage and have just given birth to a baby boy - a factor that disrupts their separate lives while conflicting their married life. Sarah has a physician friend Adrien (Michel Blanc, so memorable in his role in 'Monsieur Hire') who is gay, and while he is older, he still longs for the company of young men. Adrien meets the young catering student Manu (Johan Libéreau), a lad whose sexual appetite is satisfied by trysts in parks, back rooms of bars, etc. Manu and his opera singer sister Julie (Julie Depardieu) live modestly in a sleazy hotel cum brothel that is under surveillance by Mehdi. Adrien and Manu strike up a friendship and are invited to join Sarah and Mehdi to Sarah's mother's cabin by the sea and while there a relationship between Manu and Mehdi begins, one that will become an affair in secret. A strange disease comes to public attention and it is Adrien who is in charge of the investigation of the disease now called AIDS. Though Adrien's ties with Manu have become platonic while Manu see Mehdi daily, Adrien is the first to notice lesions on Manu, lesions that are the hallmark of AIDS. How this discovery affects the lives of each of the characters we have met (the 'witnesses' to a very important time in our history) serves as the crux of the story - part tragedy and part a torch of resilience the weaves the story to a close in an honest, touching but never maudlin manner. The acting is consistently excellent, the sort of ensemble acting that keeps the focus on the message of the film rather than on individual attention to characters. The movie is beautifully photographed by Julien Hirsch and the musical score by Philippe Sarde wisely blends excerpts from Vivaldi and Mozart with original music that recalls the 1980s. This is yet another triumph for André Téchiné - a film that deserves the widest possible audience. Grady Harp

A somewhat schematic script - you can almost see the boxes being ticked as each issue is dealt with - does not ultimately detract from a fine achievement. The story surrounds the succumbing to HIV-AIDS by a life-loving young man at the time when the world was taken by surprise by the ferocity of the hitherto-unknown virus. The various reactions - bewilderment, fear, panic, hatred, self-loathing, guilt, determination, courage, loss, grief and, of course, love - are all charted in the five central characters.There can be little argument, I'd have thought, concerning the excellence of Michel Blanc's performance; nor of the puzzling awfulness of Lorenzo Balducci's - whyever was this Italian actor cast as an American who had been brought up in Australia? Julie Depardieu's character is the least developed of the central quintet but nevertheless the actress manages, as ever, to make a fully-rounded contribution.Emanuelle Beart's striking features and dynamic screen presence make it difficult to assess her as an actress. In the end she didn't convince me she was any kind of writer, but she was entirely convincing as a mother with ambivalence to her baby. The scene where her character talks to her own mother (the late Maia Simon, in a brief but noteworthy final performance) about the difficulties surrounding her own birth is one of the most tender in the film.Johan Libéreau is touching as the doomed Manu, fleshing out what seems to me to be a somewhat idealised character - unreflective but sensitive, foolhardy yet vulnerable.But the film ultimately belongs to Sami Bouajila as the policeman who finds himself in the most unexpected of relationships. It's by far the most complex role and also, perhaps for that very reason, the most believable. Bouajila embraces the contradictions, possibly realising, as Heath Ledger proved so memorably in Brokeback Mountain, that struggles with sexuality can produce compelling drama.Les Temoins is well edited, photographed and, on the whole, well directed. The influence of Truffaut's Jules Et Jim is all-pervading, but it's none the worse for that. The film's biggest advantage is that it tackles its subject in an entirely unsentimental way: the same script made in Hollywood would undoubtedly turn into something unspeakably gooey - the memory of Philadelphia, with which it could all too easily be compared, makes me shudder. Les Temoins is way, way above that.

There is much potential for this to be made into a great film with flashes of brilliant ideas - a young homosexual who sells himself for sex lives with his budding opera singer of a sister; yet this relationship is barely touched upon, and her character barely developed. A Muslim cop married to an atheist writer who struggles with maternity; a lonely and ageing doctor who watches his would-be lover contract HIV.This film is a perfect example of how to write a bad screenplay -- every scene in which there is dialogue is an argument. The characters are haphazardly portrayed, and whole chunks of storytelling are left up to our imagination. Our homosexual protagonist seems to travel through wormholes between Paris and south of France, as he is poor, and we never see him drive, fly, or take the train. Seaons come and go faster than the characters and relationships develop. We are given glimpses into a female writer's life, yet the reason why she is a writer is of little to no importance to the story, and there is only a suggestion of what she writes. The dreary, stilted arguments, where the script leaves no subtext or nuance for the actors to work with make soap operas seem high brow.

Overall, this movie was OK. The male lead actors all were very good and believable in their parts. The homosexuality was presented in a natural, matter-of-fact manner, instead of pedantic or problematic. The way the start of the aids era was captured was disturbing, but it seemed very realistic. There were some things in this movie that annoyed me however. First of all, the female characters. Depardieu is your typical withdrawn, a-sexual, artistic, female French cinema archetype. I can live with that though. Far more irritating was the presence of Beart, who was totally miscast. What is a blown-up plastic Barbie doll doing in a movie that is situated in the early eighties, when plastic surgery was not even properly born yet?? Her acting is (partly due to her renovated face) very flat and expressionless and it would have been better if she had been altogether left out. An other revealing mistake is the American guy/gay, who shows up in the last part of the movie; quite confusing when a character who is so proud of his multi-lingual talents has such a strong foreign accent when he speaks his mother tongue...