The Witnesses (2008)

recommended

Boring, long, and too preachy.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

For almost an hour this French story of love and its dynamics slogs along painfully, its object obscured. A policeman of Islamic descent has married a young woman partly for her money. She doesn't care. He's a sexual dynamo. She doesn't even care that he sees other women -- or a man, for that matter.The other man is an innocent-looking young gay guy who is having an affair with a gay doctor, interrupted now by the attentions of the police officer.Everyone goes around shrugging shoulders and gesticulating except the doctor who is fiercely jealous and has lost his young lover. It's all rather comme ci, comme ca, until finally a brief announcement is seen on TV that a mysterious disease is spreading among the gay community.The young man has it, the others don't. The whole business is treated without melodrama and without any overt attempts to engage the viewer emotionally, except insofar as we are saddened by the illness of the innocent young man and we share the anxiety of those who have made love with him. Amor vincit omnia, and then you roll over and go to sleep.I found the sexual juggling a little boring. I didn't really care much who wound up with whom. And the way AIDS was treated was something of a disappointment. Neither moral nor medical questions were raised. It was as if something had intruded into a couple of love affairs and the consequences, though tragic, were also a damned nuisance.The photography is crisp and evocative, the direction efficient, the budget modest. If this doesn't achieve all it seems to have set out for, I still wish there were more efforts made along these lines. My God, what an improvement it is over another Batman movie!I wish the characters had been made more engaging. As it is, I wound up feeling as if I were watching them through the wrong end of a telescope.

A somewhat schematic script - you can almost see the boxes being ticked as each issue is dealt with - does not ultimately detract from a fine achievement. The story surrounds the succumbing to HIV-AIDS by a life-loving young man at the time when the world was taken by surprise by the ferocity of the hitherto-unknown virus. The various reactions - bewilderment, fear, panic, hatred, self-loathing, guilt, determination, courage, loss, grief and, of course, love - are all charted in the five central characters.There can be little argument, I'd have thought, concerning the excellence of Michel Blanc's performance; nor of the puzzling awfulness of Lorenzo Balducci's - whyever was this Italian actor cast as an American who had been brought up in Australia? Julie Depardieu's character is the least developed of the central quintet but nevertheless the actress manages, as ever, to make a fully-rounded contribution.Emanuelle Beart's striking features and dynamic screen presence make it difficult to assess her as an actress. In the end she didn't convince me she was any kind of writer, but she was entirely convincing as a mother with ambivalence to her baby. The scene where her character talks to her own mother (the late Maia Simon, in a brief but noteworthy final performance) about the difficulties surrounding her own birth is one of the most tender in the film.Johan Libéreau is touching as the doomed Manu, fleshing out what seems to me to be a somewhat idealised character - unreflective but sensitive, foolhardy yet vulnerable.But the film ultimately belongs to Sami Bouajila as the policeman who finds himself in the most unexpected of relationships. It's by far the most complex role and also, perhaps for that very reason, the most believable. Bouajila embraces the contradictions, possibly realising, as Heath Ledger proved so memorably in Brokeback Mountain, that struggles with sexuality can produce compelling drama.Les Temoins is well edited, photographed and, on the whole, well directed. The influence of Truffaut's Jules Et Jim is all-pervading, but it's none the worse for that. The film's biggest advantage is that it tackles its subject in an entirely unsentimental way: the same script made in Hollywood would undoubtedly turn into something unspeakably gooey - the memory of Philadelphia, with which it could all too easily be compared, makes me shudder. Les Temoins is way, way above that.

There is much potential for this to be made into a great film with flashes of brilliant ideas - a young homosexual who sells himself for sex lives with his budding opera singer of a sister; yet this relationship is barely touched upon, and her character barely developed. A Muslim cop married to an atheist writer who struggles with maternity; a lonely and ageing doctor who watches his would-be lover contract HIV.This film is a perfect example of how to write a bad screenplay -- every scene in which there is dialogue is an argument. The characters are haphazardly portrayed, and whole chunks of storytelling are left up to our imagination. Our homosexual protagonist seems to travel through wormholes between Paris and south of France, as he is poor, and we never see him drive, fly, or take the train. Seaons come and go faster than the characters and relationships develop. We are given glimpses into a female writer's life, yet the reason why she is a writer is of little to no importance to the story, and there is only a suggestion of what she writes. The dreary, stilted arguments, where the script leaves no subtext or nuance for the actors to work with make soap operas seem high brow.

Overall, this movie was OK. The male lead actors all were very good and believable in their parts. The homosexuality was presented in a natural, matter-of-fact manner, instead of pedantic or problematic. The way the start of the aids era was captured was disturbing, but it seemed very realistic. There were some things in this movie that annoyed me however. First of all, the female characters. Depardieu is your typical withdrawn, a-sexual, artistic, female French cinema archetype. I can live with that though. Far more irritating was the presence of Beart, who was totally miscast. What is a blown-up plastic Barbie doll doing in a movie that is situated in the early eighties, when plastic surgery was not even properly born yet?? Her acting is (partly due to her renovated face) very flat and expressionless and it would have been better if she had been altogether left out. An other revealing mistake is the American guy/gay, who shows up in the last part of the movie; quite confusing when a character who is so proud of his multi-lingual talents has such a strong foreign accent when he speaks his mother tongue...