Love and sex in the time of AIDS

From left: Sami Bouajila, Emmanuelle Béart, Johan Libéreau, and Michel Blanc star in a tale set in France in the mid-1980s. (strand releasing)

André Téchiné's "The Witnesses" gently presents the dawn of the AIDS epidemic in mid-1980s France. The tenderness is typical of Téchiné; even a sense of panic is intimate as opposed to widespread. This is the epidemic from love's point of view, a story as much about how the disease can ravage the heart as it does the body. It is also Téchiné's best film since 1998's superb "Alice et Martin," and 1994's even better "Wild Reeds."

In a flurry of scenes that show off Téchiné's exhilarating directorial transparency, we're quickly dropped into the lives of the movie's half dozen or so characters. André (Michel Blanc), a bald middle-aged doctor, goes cruising one night in a Parisian park and accosts the younger, taller Manu (Johan Libéreau). The kid's not interested in sex, but he does ask André to hold his jacket while he dives into a tryst already in session behind some bushes. (Casual public sex has never looked this tame, and the movie steers clear of sensationalist gay clichés.)

It's the start of a complicated friendship. André is insecure and a little pitiful, but Blanc gives the character more than enough righteousness to keep André unpredictable. His one-way attraction to Manu becomes an unhealthy adulation.

Manu, meanwhile, lives in a brothel with his sister, Julie (Julie Depardieu), an aspiring opera singer, and has struck up a friendship with Sandra (Constance Dollé), the flamboyant hooker who hangs out across the street. So the bourgeois frills André dangles in front of him seem much more appealing. André, for instance, takes Manu to the lake home of his friend Sarah (Emmanuelle Béart), who herself is a piece of work. A children's author and new mom, she discovers she hates kids, including her own, and aspires both to write an adult novel and to acquire a lifestyle upgrade that her police-detective husband, Mehdi (Sami Bouajila), can't give.

The pieces fall into place neatly and suddenly. One afternoon at the lake house, Mehdi saves Manu from drowning, and over the course of a few weeks a love affair erupts between them that's derailed when André gets a look at the sores on Manu's chest. And as a matter of pride and vanity, Manu can't bring himself to let Mehdi see his deterioration.

Bouajila's discreet, aching performance is at the center of all this upheaval. He happens to be the detective responsible for shutting down that brothel, rounding up and arresting hookers and pimps for their peccadilloes, while struggling with the medical and emotional implications of his own.

Téchiné wrote "The Witnesses" with Laurent Guyot and Viviane Zingg, and the movie doesn't bother going deep into the ways AIDS shifted sexual politics and sexual practices. It doesn't plumb its characters' psychologies, either. And the choice to have opportunistic Sarah narrate the action from the book she's apparently written seems redundant, since the film itself coasts on easy literariness and manages to incriminate Sarah before she gets the opportunity to do it herself.

Nonetheless, Téchiné has always been a master of exploring people and situations at sea-level. He traverses surfaces without ever seeming superficial.The effect is often achieved through pure technique - the way Julien Hirsch's camera races with Manu along the banks of a marsh or tracks Mehdi as his face crumbles; the way Martine Giordano's editing swings us in and out of scenes with breathtaking briskness, allowing the characters to crash the story, make themselves at home for a scene or two, and then leave.

In so many ways, Téchiné's films are about human connection and the obstructions that fracture the bonds among them. Those barriers can be politics ("Wild Reeds"), family secrets ("Alice et Martin"), or the passing years ("Changing Times"). For "The Witnesses," the breaking point is disease and the emotional scars it leaves long after the suffering have succumbed. Life goes on, but it's hardly the same.