Structured in three chapters over changing seasons, The Witnesses opens in Paris in the summer of 1984 with the caption, "Happy Days", immediately prompting the suspicion that these won't last, writes Michael Dwyer.
THE WITNESSES/ LES TÉMOINS ****
Directed by André Techiné. Starring Michel Blanc, Emmanuelle Béart, Sami Bouajila, Johan Libéreau, Julie Depardieu.Club, IFI Dublin, 115 min
Sarah (Emmanuelle Béart), a writer of children's books, has just had her first child. Her husband, Mehdi (Sami Bouajila), a Muslim, is a detective with the vice squad. Their close friend Adrien (Michel Blanc) is a middle-aged doctor who delivered their baby son.
Adrien meets the catalyst of the drama, Manu (Johan Libéreau), a handsome young catering school graduate who dreams of opening his own restaurant, when he is cruising for gay sex in a park by night. Newly arrived in Paris, Manu shares a cheap hotel room with his sister Julie (Julie Depardieu), a struggling opera singer.
Adrien falls head over heels for the promiscuous Manu, and while they develop a close friendship, he is frustrated by Manu's insistence that it remains platonic. Matters become a great deal more complicated when Adrien brings him on a Mediterranean holiday with Mehdi and Sarah. The turning point comes when Mehdi saves Manu from drowning, holding his body in a pose inspired by Michelangelo's Pieta.
Writer-director André Techiné precisely captures the sexual freedom of the era and the self-absorption of the film's protagonists. Sarah and Mehdi live in a mutually agreed open relationship, and while she enjoys trysts with her editor (Xavier Beauvois), Mehdi remains faithful until he unexpectedly finds himself plunged into a passionate affair.
As winter arrives in the second chapter, the spectre of the new disease that is Aids looms over one of the characters with consequences for all of them. The Witnesses is the 17th feature film directed by Techiné, a Cahiers du Cinema critic before he turned from writing about movies to making his own, and it ranks with his most accomplished films from the mid-1990s, Les Roseaux Sauvages (Wild Reeds) and Les Voleurs (The Thieves).
He again demonstrates his subtle flair for classically formed storytelling in the new film as he addresses issues of commitment, fidelity, hypocrisy and obsession. The central cast is exemplary in this honest, thoughtful and deeply involving moral drama.
