The Witnesses (english subs hard encoded) GAY interest

The Witnesses (english subs hard encoded) EXCELLENT MOVIE

aka: (Les Témoins) GAY interest !! Year: 2007

Synopsis:

The year is 1984. The place is Paris, France. Manu is a young gay man from the country recently arrived in Paris. During the course of one year, several individuals will become involved with Manu and through him with each other. André Téchiné’s The Witnesses is typically French in its nuancing of several shades of love, and brings fresh perspective to how AIDS changed the world in the 1980s, a time that now feels like more than a mere generation ago.

As the film opens, Adrien (Michel Blanc), a fifty-something gay doctor and the emotional center of this film, is engaged in conversation with a young gay man recently arrived in Paris from the country. Manu (Johan Libéreau) is too busy cruising the park to take Adrien’s sexual overture seriously, and soon disappears into the bushes to join an orgy already in progress. Manu is precocious, adventurous, and self-assured, yet naïvely cruel in a manner typical of the new gay kid in the big city. This opening gambit, a classic meditation on patron as older lover and ingénu as younger beloved, sets an ironic stage for the unbidden, unwelcome arrival of that stranger soon to be known as SIDA (AIDS).

Meanwhile, Adrien’s friend Sarah (Emmanuelle Béart) has just had her first child with her husband Mehdi (Sami Bouajila), a Parisian vice cop of Algerian descent. Sarah, an artist and a very immature woman, has no natural affinity to children. She is frequently framed in glowing, searing, burning yellows, framed in scenes similarly saturated with yellows, from nearby flowers, drapes, fabrics, walls, as if she were somehow a part of the very fabric of her environment.

And Mehdi is about to have an emotional encounter with Manu, rescuing the latter in a freak swimming accident. What should have been a happy occasion for the married couple has become the occasion for grave personal and artistic self-doubt in the wife, and an alibi for the vice cop to explore the transgressive erotic side of this unexpected emotional attachment outside his married life.

To complete the scenario, add to this mix Manu’s sister Julie (Julie Depardieu); Manu is staying with his sister in her room in a neighborhood brothel. The Paris bohemian milieu as familiar set piece allows Téchiné to insert a political history of AIDS into the narrative, and dramatize it, thereby avoiding the didactic tone and reportage-from-the-trenches quality of many earlier films dealing with the emergence of AIDS.

Various love stories unfold, at times running parallel, at times jumping tracks, physical passions refracted through increasingly deeper and muddier emotional bonds. As betrayals and alliances mutate (foreshadowing the evolution of AIDS itself), each person will soon find himself or herself an unwilling witness to the ravages that this emergent illness will come to unleash on their hearts and lives.

A highly deserving and thoroughly engrossing dramatist, Téchiné (Wild Reeds, 1994) affords himself the opportunity to reintroduce the most devastating page of the sexual history of the twentieth century to new audiences. The Witnesses makes for a timely and timeless telling of the tale of AIDS, the most political disease of modern times, and how it shattered an innocence no one knew existed until it was gone. Never polemical, frequently philosophical, occasionally saturnine, and beautifully filmed and acted, this film is a minor masterpiece, and one of the best films about AIDS to date.

REVIEW: (Les Témoins)

André Téchiné's sprawling drama sees the onset of the Aids epidemic from the ground up. Téchiné's film is a fictionalised testimonial to events that were all too real, and lives that do not deserve to be forgotten. The Witnesses is hardly the first film to deal with the human cost of Aids - Cyril Collard's Savage Nights (1992), Mike Figgis's One Night Stand (1997) and François Ozon's Time To Leave (2005) have all done this before - but by devoting so much time to his characters before introducing the disease, and by giving so little indication, beyond our retrospective knowledge of historical chronology, that the disease is even coming, Téchiné recreates the growing incomprehension and panic of the time, while allowing us to glimpse his characters in all their joys and sorrows. No one here is drowned in cliche or reduced to victimhood.

At the same time, for all the complexity of their interactions and the difficulty of their choices, Téchiné's characters are not really engaging enough to retain our interest for the film's rather lengthy duration (with Julie in particular hardly having any obvious importance) - and the life-affirming coda, however qualified it may be, still seems awkwardly tacked on. Only the uniformly strong performances and Julien Hirsch's painterly cinematography will have viewers holding on to the bitter end.

--- review by: Film4 Website