I do admire the way André Téchiné has tried to chart a middle path through French art cinema, intelligent and conscious of formal concerns but still trying to connect with a larger audience with the emotional content of his films. True, this doesn’t always work (and his last film Changing Times seemed a particularly weak effort, with everything running on automatic, so to speak) but with The Witnesses he’s made one of his best films. It’s also the first time a gay theme — although present in earlier films — has been made the centre of the story. Set in the eighties just before the onset of AIDS, the first, very effective part works with fast-paced economy to sketch the central relationships. Things get more sombre and the light literally darker in the second part when Manu starts succumbing to AIDS and the other relationships start to fray in their own way, but Téchiné never overplays it, elliptical where another filmmaker would try to draw out the sentiment. He concludes the film with a nice conceit, a return to the summery setting of the first part but a setting from which Manu is now absent. It’s the other characters who remain as the “witnesses” of the title, witnesses to the mark Manu has made on the world and on their lives.
by Ian Johnston | Source: 35mm print
30 Dec 2007 11:31 AM | Submit Comment
