The AIDS Crisis, essentially a period drenched with death, is often retold as a heartwarming story of survival: the survival of communities, the grief and bravery of those who've forged ahead despite losing friends and loved ones. Unfortunately, André Téchiné's otherwise enjoyable Les Témoins (The Witnesses) also privileges the surviving bystanders while giving the dead - and their deaths - relatively short shrift.
Manu (Johan Libéreau) is a lusty hottie from the Pyrennes who moves to Paris with his sister (Julie Depardieu), who's training as an Opera singer. Cruising the park one night Manu encounters Adrien (Michael Blanc), an aging doctor. They strike an unlikely friendship which remains strictly platonic, much to Adrien's frustration. Adrien introduces Manu to his friend Sarah (Emmanuelle Beart) and her husband Mehdi (Sami Bouajila), who's far more interested in their new baby than his dreamy, self-absorbed wife is. The four head to the French Riviera for a weekend, and Manu almost drowns. Mehdi rescues him, performs mouth to mouth resucitation and unexpectedly, the pair become lovers.
In the second act (The Witnesses is divided into three titled acts) Adrien throws himself into research and social policy when a strange new disease starts to appear among gay men, and lovingly nurses Manu as he begins to decay with what comes to be called AIDS. Mehdi and Sarah take HIV tests and temporarily separate after Adrien spills the beans about the mens' secret affair. The third section of the film takes the three surviving characters back to the French Riviera, for their annual holiday, minus Manu and the relative innocence of their previous vacation.
The Witnesses holds up very well during its first half. It's fast paced and to the point, even though there's nothing remotely 80s about the hairstyles, clothes and interior decorating choices of any character. A somewhat creepy female voiceover narration that drops in out of nowhere and refuses to go away fills in the gaps as the story races to its midpoint, but once there, the movie starts to fall apart as what had been a smart tale of overlaid sets of unexpected love-triangles collapses into stock gay/AIDS rhetoric and an unwelcome, incongruous sickly sentimentality. As Manu dies, Adrien begins to lecture all and sundry about the need for urgent research - though we don't see a sinlge other person with AIDS in the entire film and apart from self-admitted gay bathhouse slut Manu, no other character seems to be at any real risk. Adrien, an older gay, remains negative, while Mehdi and Sarah also go uninfected.
And the poor work on sick Manu's face by the film's make-up artist becomes a metaphor for the ability of Techine to really get a grip on what he'd started here. Manu doesn't exhibit an iota of hesitation, doubt or guilt as he goes fucking like crazy, having the time of his life throughout 1982, '83 and '84, as any juicy young hottie would. Yet when dictating his life story into Adrien's tape recorder, he laments how the public shame of being gay made him seek sex in secret, in beats, parks and bathhouses, and so it was this social approbation which "led to" his and other young gay mens' infection with HIV, not their high-octane sex lives, which they pursued and enjoyed with relish.
Sarah acts out of character, too, once she learns of Manu's affair with her husband, and Mehdi's obsession with his own HIV-status unconvincingly takes the place of what should be his confusion and grief over Manu's death (Sami Bouajila, however, is a strong actor and really redeems himself after the unforgivably dense Funny Felix). I kept yearning for the apocalyptic grit of Cyril Collard's Savage Nights, rather than a lilting ode to thwarted man-boy love, something explored in Techine's 1994 piece, Wild Reeds, where a young gay forms a crush on an ostensibly straight peer, before confessing all to a moping, older gay professional.
Anything would have been preferable to the strangely Christian second-half of this film, though, which treats the painful death of a starry-eyed young spunk as little more than an agent for change in the lives of others.
Related Reading:
Savage Nights
Philadelphia
Funny Felix
Review by Mark Adnum
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