AIDS is not mentioned until “The Witnesses” is two- thirds over, but its specter hangs over the entire film.
It’s 1984, two of the main characters are gay, and most of them have unsafe sex with various partners in “Witnesses,” so, from the get-go, we’re meant to wonder who will get sick. Will it be Manu, maybe?
He’s the most vulnerable, since he is the most connected with everyone in the film. Manu is friends with AIDS researcher Adrien but cruises for anonymous sex in parks and also begins a relationship with Mehdi, who is in an open marriage (hey, it’s Paris) with Sarah.
The timeliness of this film is questionable. Some details are sloppy or wrong (a hospital sheet is clearly labeled “2006” in one scene). Surely by 1984, the French were more aware of what AIDS meant than these characters are. And, veracity aside, this whole life-was-changing-in-the-age -of-AIDS thing was done a lot in American independent films of the 1980s and ’90s.
Fortunately, the surprisingly light-hearted “Witnesses” is more informed by AIDS than about it. Writer/director Andre Techine uses it as a lens through which he views five characters (there’s also Manu’s sister, Julie) whose lives are fragmented and incomplete. “Witnesses” opens with deliberately fragmentary scenes that force us to piece together the relationships (it was 45 minutes before I figured out Manu and Julie are siblings), which is a way of suggesting that these five people have each conquered one aspect of life — work, family, sex — but can’t get a handle on the others.
As all of the characters are forced to grapple, one way or another, with AIDS, they also re-examine the choices they’ve made. It becomes a movie about figuring out how to live a full life, and “The Witnesses” is necessarily a bittersweet one, since so many people who came of age in the ’80s never had a chance.
“The Witnesses”
R for nudity and language. 1 hour, 54 minutes. Directed by Andre Techine. Written by Techine, Laurent Guyot, Viviane Zingg. Photography by Julien Hirsch. Starring Michel Blanc, Emmanuelle Beart, Sami Bouajila, Julie Depardieu and Johan Libereau. Opens today at the Starz FilmCenter.
