Bodies of Evidence
The Witnesses makes a convincing case for triumph over tragedy.
Recommended
; "CALLED TO THE SAND: Sarah (Emmanuelle Béart), Adrien (Michel Blanc) and Manu (Johan Libéreau) spend a life-changing weekend in the country.")
CALLED TO THE SAND: Sarah (Emmanuelle Béart), Adrien (Michel Blanc) and Manu (Johan Libéreau) spend a life-changing weekend in the country. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION) |
For a director whose characters are often at the mercy of their passions, André Téchiné makes films of quiet delicacy. The characters in The Witnesses (Les Témoins) move in and out of one another's orbits like dust motes drifting in autumn light, whipped to and fro by currents they can feel but never see. Despite its somber subject matter, the movie is in bright, sun-drenched colors and briskly cut, so the effect of one scene reverberates into the next.
Sarah, an author of children's books, is married to Mehdi (Sami Bouajila), a morals-squad detective, and has just given birth to their first child, but the hoped-for bond has yet to materialize — either between mother and child or husband and wife. When the baby cries, Sarah looks lost, wide-eyed and helpless, as if her body has suddenly become too big for her. She is struggling with her first adult novel, but she is unable to move forward, and her anxiety is straining her already fragile marriage.
Elsewhere, the camera follows Manu (Johan Libéreau), a young man newly arrived from the provinces, into one of Paris' parks, where he promptly sets to cruising the men who seem to be crammed into every doorway and behind every tree. Adrien (Michel Blanc), a bald, middle-aged doctor, tries his luck, but Manu guilelessly rejects him. As the chagrined older man turns, Manu runs after him, as if having second thoughts, but he only wants Adrien to hold his jacket while he gets off with two buff young things behind a nearby bush. Evidently used to such rejection, Adrien swallows the insult, and soon takes Manu under his wing, if never into his bed. As they take a bateau mouche down the Seine, they pass through the shadow of a bridge and out into the sun, the light warming Adrien's face as he gazes unobserved at Manu's distant frame.
On a weekend at the country house owned by Sarah's wealthy parents, the couples come together, and the lines begin to cross. When Manu goes swimming and nearly drowns, Mehdi gives him mouth-to-mouth, and the contact inaugurates a passionate affair between them. Téchiné has given no hint that Mehdi might be bisexual, but in his movies, a character's sexuality is assumed to be fluid until proven otherwise. Téchiné does not submit easily to boundaries of any kind, be they sexual, national or structural. Although Manu could be called The Witnesses' central character in that the story revolves around him, the movie has no protagonist. As Sarah says of her novel, "The center keeps shifting, like in life."
Eventually, the hammer drops. Manu turns up on Adrien's doorstep with full-blown AIDS, although the condition has yet to be given a name. Mehdi, normally stoic, panics, and Adrien steps in to take care of Manu, and take possession of him, as well. As the scene shifts from summer to winter, the movie begins to feel slightly claustrophobic. Adrien tells Mehdi, "People don't know it, but we're at war," but there is little sign that the world has changed outside the lives of this handful of characters.
At the end of the film, the scene shifts back to summer, and the survivors are left to take stock of what remains. But rather than prefigure the crisis ahead, Téchiné looks back with two decades' remove and finds, not looming death, but a survivor's embrace of the life that remains. Your mind circles back to the image of Mehdi in the water, holding onto Manu's inert body, kicking with all his might for the shore.
The Witnesses (Les Témoins)
Directed by André Téchiné
A Strand release
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