"The Witnesses" is a provocative and moving French drama set in the early days of the AIDS epidemic.<br /><br />It's 1983, and a young gay man by the name of Manu (Johan Libereau) has come to Paris, where his sister (Julie Depardieu), an aspiring opera singer, lives. Almost immediately, Manu enters into a platonic relationship with Adrien (Michel Blanc), a middle-aged doctor who falls in love with Manu despite the fact that the young man sees Adrien as just a pal. Meanwhile, Adrien introduces Manu to a longtime friend, Sarah (Emmanuelle Beart), a writer of children's books, and Mehdi (Sami Bouajila), her husband who works as a vice cop in the city. Eventually, Manu taps into Mehdi's latent attraction to men and the two strike up a tentative, secret relationship. But before long a mysterious and deadly disease has arrived on the scene, changing the lives of these characters - and of countless others in the world - in ways they could never possibly have imagined.<br /><br />Even though "The Witnesses" deals with a very grim and serious subject, its primary focus always rests on the characters and the complex relationships that define them. Written by Andre Techine, Laurent Guyot and Viviane Zingg and directed by Techine, "The Witnesses" draws us into the lives of these people precisely because it refuses to make an undue fuss over them and how they choose to live their lives. In fact, much of the narrative feels spontaneous and unformed, almost as if the writers were making it up as they go along. The result is that the incidents don't feel contrived or forced, and we are never tempted to question their credibility. In fact, the filmmakers often seem to go out of their way to avoid doing the obvious, often building up to scenes (a dying man's trip to his sister's opera performance, a final meeting between estranged lovers, a maudlin, drawn-out death scene) that never end up taking place - just as in real life.<br /><br />The characters, moreover, are richly drawn, with each emerging as a nicely balanced combination of weaknesses and strengths. Manu, for example, is basically a happy-go-lucky kid who's just beginning to find his way in life and who demonstrates that he has a tremendous capacity for joie de vive and emotional tenderness - even if his youth and inexperience occasionally lead him to hurt others in ways that he doesn't yet fully comprehend. It becomes doubly tragic, then, when the fates demand such a harsh, unforgiving punishment from him. Sarah is a recent mother who admits quite frankly that she appears not to have much of a maternal instinct, looking upon her newborn more as a hindrance than as a blessing. Her husband, Mehdi, is a mass of contradictions as he tries to come to terms with his bisexuality, falling further in love with Manu, even while raiding dens of iniquity in his on-duty hours. Finally, Adrien is the lonely older man whose wisdom born of experience ultimately gives strength and guidance to others.<br /><br />The performances are uniformly excellent throughout, and Techine's direction can be either down-to-earth or lyrical depending on which of those two seemingly contradictory tones a particular scene calls for.<br /><br />"The Witnesses" is a sad movie but not a depressing one, for its canny recognition that humans have an endless capacity for regeneration and hope even in the face of unimaginable suffering carries us beyond the tragic nature of its subject matter.