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| Les témoins, France 2007 |
In the idyllic summer of 1984, charismatic young Manu (Johan Libéreau) joins his doctor friend Adrien (Michel Blanc) and a married couple on a blissful Riviera holiday. The couple – children’s writer Sarah (Emmanuelle Béart) and police detective Mehdi (Sami Bouajila) – are going through a crisis after the birth of their first child and Mehdi is irresistibly drawn towards Manu. Soon after, Manu comes down with a mysterious new disease. André Téchiné’s (The Wild Reeds, I Don’t Kiss) fast-moving, engrossing and entertaining drama revolves around the AIDS crisis of the mid 1980s, but its real theme is love and acceptance. A rich screenplay and bright comedy colours celebrate the spirit of the 80s as a time of great social and sexual freedom, embodied by young Johan Libéreau as the blithe, carefree Manu, whose irrepressible joie de vivre refuses to accept the limitations of monogamy. – NZ International Film Festival The French director André Téchiné is a master at evoking personality quirks, the unpredictability of relationships and the haphazard way love affairs, friendships and social groups form and dissolve. Many of his films, like Changing Times and Wild Reeds, portray a multicultural environment in which French and North African characters mingle, sometimes uneasily. His films are also casually sensual. The fluid sexuality of at least one male character in most Téchiné films is almost a given; the director’s strong, free-spirited women are in charge of their own sexuality to a degree rarely found in American movies, unless those women are designated as vixens. But if the world according to Téchiné is a liberated wonderland with few boundaries, living there comfortably requires that you wear sophisticated psychological armor. His newest film, The Witnesses, set in 1984, observes this wonderland shocked out of its complacency by the arrival of AIDS. Suddenly a closely knit group of friends – straight, gay and bisexual – is forced to confront the uncertainties and terrors of the epidemic in its early days. – Stephen Holden, New York Times |
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