By Armond White

The Witnesses
Directed by André Téchiné
at IFC Center

The Films of Olivier Assayas
Feb. 1-10 at Anthology Film Archives

Johan Libereau is an open-faced and puppyish ingénue with incorruptible cheeks—the kind of features our mainstream journalists stupidly call “All-American.” But in André Téchiné’s The Witnesses (Les Temoins), a lovesick older Frenchman says, “That kid is a spell woven by Eros and presented by Venus”—a Proust-like elevation of Libereau’s erotic ease and guilelessness as Manu, the film’s central character. Manu hits a nighttime Parisian cruising park like a kid at Disneyland. Watching him inhale beach air or leap up the branches of a tree, over-sophisticated adults respond to and covet his eagerness. What kind of artist could turn this youthful ideal into an aching tragic figure?

Flashback: In 1995, when André Téchiné’s masterpiece Wild Reeds opened, the critical establishment from The Times to the alternative press took sides calling it inferior to Cold Water by Olivier Assayas, a Téchiné acolyte. Wild Reeds was a startling, moving account of four teens growing up sexually, guided by movies and pop music but perplexed by politics. Cold Water indulged adolescent confusion in a coming-of-age story that fetishized small-town kids’ alienation. This was a harbinger of film culture’s movement away from classical humanism toward cliquish elitism.

By extraordinary coincidence, Téchiné’s latest film, The Witnesses, opens this week opposite the Anthology Film Archives’ Assayas retrospective. There’s never been a New York retrospective for Téchiné—the best French director most Americans don’t know—but The Witnesses will bring lucky viewers up to date. This new movie, set in 1984, flashes back to a moment in human history that altered the personal-political lives of most people on the planet. But Téchiné is more than a historian or propagandist. The Witnesses replays Wild Reeds in its tale of four adults—an anxious woman among three conflicted males—whose sexual and political lives change profoundly.

Téchiné concentrates on emotional turmoil (as opposed to Assayas’ frivolous passing fancies), resulting in “classical humanism” that is unconventionally keen and brusque. The Witnesses is a period-piece but feels utterly contemporary through its characters’ urgent, overlapping imperatives: Manu (Johan Libéreau) comes to Paris from the provinces to follow his passions and quickly finds an older mentor, Adrien (Michel Blanc), a gay bachelor who introduces Manu to his best friend, Sarah (Emmanuelle Béart), a novelist and discontented new mother and her husband Medhi (Sami Bouajila), a police detective who is triply undercover. Manu, Sarah, Adrien and Medhi are witnesses to the phenomena of love, compromise, fate—individuals living out history. Not devoted to the past as such, Téchiné thrusts us into his characters’ experiences—into their skins.

Téchiné’s blessed with that Nouvelle Vague gift for emotionally charged imagery like the opening shot of Sarah at her red Olivetti typewriter underneath blazing red credits. Form and feeling mesh, prompting fascination, comprehension and exhilaration. The Witnesses is structured in three parts—“Happy Days,” “The War” and “Summer Returns”—but its meanings are not chaptered out. They erupt in casual epiphanies—moments that distill a character’s conflicts in a gesture or a composition: Sarah bumping into Medhi as he dandles their infant. Manu touching Medhi’s back. Medhi driving past a security barrier. Adrien holding Manu’s jacket while cruising or projecting his sorrow into a performance of Figaro or watching an American pick-up bathing.

Those scenes—those ideas—connect and are cyclical. In effect, the story keeps propelling and refining itself. That process also describes Téchiné’s characters, each one remarkably vivid. Emmanuelle Béart is a good muse for Téchiné. She sharp-focuses some of his most audacious movies—I Don’t Kiss (J’embrasse Pas) and Strayed—and narrates The Witnesses with saucer-eyed intensity and avid eroticism. Sarah’s privilege and edginess recall Deneuve in Téchiné’s Les Voleurs, fighting desire with intellect—a modernist version of the female identification in Visconti or Tennesee Williams. Techine’s inspiration continues with Blanc’s Adrien, updating Peter Finch’s doctor in Sunday, Bloody Sunday, adding toughness and humor to an old queen’s resilience. And Bouajila’s Medhi etches the ambivalences of a racially, sexually, socially stressed citizen—a duplicitous cop who struts. Picture Denzel Washington in an E. Lynn Harris novel to imagine such daring.
No filmmaker has a greater appreciation of human diversity than Téchiné, whose socially complex melodramas always feature age, gender and race through liberté, égalité, fraternité. That’s Téchiné's radical vision of France—postmodern, post-Colonial and post-gay liberation, with all those issues in motion. They’re fantastically embodied in Johan Libereau’s Manu.

Manu’s life suggests an archetypal gay urban fairytale: the hinterlands innocent who encounters cosmopolitan blessings then a biological curse. This almost mythical flashback—an understanding of venery to rival Angels in America—contains a too-real wallop. AIDS doesn’t stop or conclude Téchiné’s spinning narrative, but brings it gravity and perspective. Death was at the margins of Wild Reeds and redounds upon these characters, making every impetuous action unpredictable, poignant and cherished.

Certain directors reveal their ambitions more than they make meaningful contact with audiences (Assayas with his style-hopping, P.T. Anderson’s attenuated narratives, Todd Haynes’ self-aggrandizing deconstructions). In The Witnesses, Téchiné finds a miraculous way to reexamine the world’s enormous, inescapable, late-’80s millennial change. (“The hub has shifted,” Sarah tells Medhi, speaking personally, yet politically.)

Last year, Zabou Brietman’s visually ravishing Man of My Life posed the quandary of sexual freedom challenging contemporary bourgeois domesticity and got bungled up with politically correct situations that seemed contrived until her basic sympathy broke through. But without a single lachrymose, cynical or false instant, Téchiné looks back in awe at how generations lived, grieved and persevered: Manu brightens Sarah, Adrien and Medhi’s lives, then his light goes out. And yet the sun rises.

These fleeting observations in The Witnesses amount to an epic story, but it only feels like that afterward—when the images and characters, emotions and history trouble your memory. If the Assayas crowd dismisses The Witnesses as life-affirming (as they foolishly dismissed Wild Reeds), it’s because they don’t understand that Téchiné—with his unforgettable focus on Manu—shows what life-affirming really means.