The Witnesses

Andre Techine’s new film, “The Witnesses”, is a difficult and courageous vision wrapped in a gay romance and sophisticated contemporary folklore. Set in Paris, 1984, at the onset of the AIDS epidemic, it weaves together the fates of five characters whose lives passively bear witness to their era, location and personal histories. For each one of them there is a moment of experience in which the observer becomes the act-or, awakening momentarily to witness in a deeper, evidential way the truth of his/her singular existence and struggle and is permitted, through the convergence of freedom and necessity, to make some mark in the world.

That these moments of transformation do not eventuate in transformed characters is one of the more shocking aspects of this bristling story. The changes that occur are not meaningless, but the film questions the model we use to view the development of character and of life itself. The neat progression of stacking, cumulative perceptions is replaced by the random non-linear hyper-action of the molecular images of the replicating virus and the ceaseless up/down, in/out of the flow of waves along the shore.

The film opens with a furiously-paced score that matches the intensity of a young woman, Sarah, stabbing at the keys of a red typewriter, her gaze darting everywhere in a desperate attempt to pull an elusive oracle out of thin air. She circles and crosses out the freshly typed lines until almost nothing remains. We feel her tension, urgency and dissatisfaction.

In a hospital corridor a handsome dark man, Mehdi- a police detective and father of a new-born- bickers with Adrien, a middle-aged doctor. Sarah, the new mother and Mehdi’s wife, looks trapped and cautious in the hospital bed, leery of the baby lying nearby.

Sarah’s friend Adrien is a gay man who cruises for sex at night in the park where he meets Manu, newly arrived in Paris with little more than youth, good looks and two years of culinary schooling. Manu is fiercely independent and clear in rejecting Adrien as a sex partner but welcomes him as a friend. Manu lives with his sister Julie, an aspiring young singer, in a small room in a seedy hotel occupied mostly by amiable prostitutes.

Early in the film, a dramatic example of the sudden call from observer to actor presents itself. Sarah invites Adrien and Manu for a seaside weekend. After lunch on the beach, Mehdi swims far out into the cove. Manu follows, swimming out past his ability and would certainly drown if not for Mehdi’s determination to pull the dead weight back to shore. The two go on to become lovers; their trysts are simultaneously full of passion and lifeless. Manu cannot give himself to anyone, while Mehdi feels physical longing, nothing more. Because their liaison is not the basis for renewal, they return to being observers of their lives, even at a carnal peak.

Adrien likes beautiful boys and can afford to treat himself. He comes to think of Manu as his great love, not least because they are not sexually involved. During a narcissistic outburst of well-practiced wounded love-pride, the doctor’s initiatory moment reveals itself in the sores and lesions on Manu’s chest that he rightly intuits as the presence of a new killer disease.

The shock of recognition allows Adrien to step out of his petty habituation, giving him a larger sphere in which to focus and utilize his estimable resources and expertise. Manu’s decline is steady and ineluctable. Whereas Mehdi could just pull Manu out of the deep water, Adrien is essentially helpless. Adrien’s commitment to starting a war against this disease while shepherding Manu through his decline and death lends his own life meaning and purpose. Once Manu dies and he picks up the next handsome boy, he is back to the mechanics of living, pattern without recognition.

Sarah learns of her husband’s affair with Manu but harbors no ill-will toward either man. What Sarah rejects is motherhood; it is not a child but a book that she wants to bring into the world. She is keenly aware of the unsympathetic response this provokes. She is honest and determined, struggling with a novel that does not come together and ultimately must be thrown out. She cannot find her story.

At Adrien’s for a Christmas dinner with Manu and Julie, Sarah asks Julie about the magic of her art. Julie is quick to disabuse Sarah of so romantic a notion. It is hard, muscular work- more like athletics- finding the right place in the throat from which to produce the correct sound. Momentarily alone with the diseased and disfigured boy that was her husband’s lover, Sarah gives Manu the kiss he asks for. Like a medieval princess encountering a leprous beggar in a wondrous legend, she willingly offers her lips; in that touch with death, chance and transcendence, Sarah understands that she has found the subject for what will undoubtedly be her one completed piece of adult fiction.

Manu’s moment comes in the humble guise of a store-bought stew provencal, casually and improperly prepared. He rejects it and along with the stew everything that is fractional and wrong, including his own life, which he ends with an overdose of pills provided by Adrien.

The day that Julie and Adrien bury her beloved brother, Julie admits that all her feeling and attention have gone to safe-guarding her voice for that night’s performance. Julie’s is a minor operatic talent at which she has slaved away to the point of becoming a viable performer in a small Mozart role. She has found the place in her throat and her place in career, but it does not correspond to any particular location in the world.

Mehdi returns to his detective work and family life; Sarah returns to her husband and child. Adrien continues his work and finds the next boy, relieved of having to rename convenience and habit as love; Julie is free to accept an offer to sing with a company in Munich; there is no reason not to go.

Thus it can be said that the witness element in Techine’s film is not about the distinction between action and observation. A character may be engaged with his or her life’s routine while not birthing new life within or without. A moment of engagement is just that: an experience of lived life. Only when a calling surfaces- saving the swimmer, fighting AIDS, perfecting vocal expression, discovering a narrative- is there a shift out of witnessing and into some completion, a hiatus from routine and the perpetual cycles of life.