Les Témoins (2007) - film review

In the summer of 1984, a gay teenager named Manu arrives in Paris looking for work.  He stays with his sister, Julie, an aspiring opera singer who rents a tiny room in a cheap hotel frequented by drug addicts and prostitutes.  Whilst cruising one evening, Manu meets Adrien, a respectable doctor in his mid-fifties.  Through Manu, Adrien experiences a new lease of life, although his relationship with the adolescent remains platonic. Adrien introduces Manu to his friend Sarah, a writer struggling with her first novel, and her husband Mehdi, a thick-skinned Algerian cop.  When Mehdi saves Manu from drowning one day, he experiences an unfamiliar attraction for the young man.  Aware of Mehdi’s interest in him, Manu draws the macho cop into a passionate love affair, which upsets Adrien profoundly.  After an absence of several weeks, Mehdi returns to visit Manu, who is now employed as a caterer at a holiday camp, and notices a marked change in his appearance and demeanour.   It is obvious that Manu is dying, but from what?   Meanwhile, the news is bombarded with reports of a strange and deadly new disease that is sweeping the western world...

In his most poignant and substantial film to date, André Téchiné shows the impact that AIDS had on an unsuspecting world through the complex and tortured relationships of five very different individuals.  Les Témoins is a thoughtful, skilfully composed essay on how people react in different ways to the same crisis, in this case how four friends of a young gay man cope with his slow and degrading death from an incurable disease.  Intense, perfectly judged performances from a high calibre cast, together with a faultless screenplay, make this one of the most powerful French dramas in recent years.
 
By not dwelling too heavily on the hideous reality of AIDS, but instead showing its consequences on a group of people who are indirectly affected by it, Téchiné avoids the cumbersome histrionics and sentimentality that has befallen many an AIDS-themed film drama.   As in the director’s earlier Les Roseaux sauvages (1994), a more upbeat but equally beguiling portrayal of human relationships, Les Témoins combines an enchanting visual lyricism with a startling, almost brutal, realism in the way that people treat one another in stress situations.  The supreme elegance of the film’s composition both belies and accentuates the cruel nature of its subject matter. 

As in all of Téchiné’s films, none of the protagonists is perfect, indeed every one of them has at least one fatal flaw.  The characters who, initially, appear to be strong and resourceful ultimately disappoint us, whist those who first appeared weak and ineffectual redeem themselves in the end through their humanity.  The prospect of death affects different people in different ways, and it is only through death that an individual’s love, both for the dying person and for life in general, reveals itself fully.  Les Témoins is an effective piece of social commentary on the AIDS pandemic of the mid-80s, but it is far more than that.  This is a film that shows how, in a moment of crisis, true compassion can assert itself and bring about a transformation of the soul.  From death and loss much good may ensue...

© James Travers 2010

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