The Witnesses

A hot children’s book writer (Emmanuelle Béart), her hot cop husband (Sami Bouajila), his hot young lover (Johan Libéreau), and an older gay doctor (Michel Blanc) — a friend of the lady’s who’s mad about the boy — mix and match in mid-1980s pansexual utopia — until death arrives unannounced in the form of AIDS. What the characters in The Witnesses — and we, the audience — pay testimony to in André Téchiné’s urgent, compassionate, and ultimately optimistic French drama are the toll the epidemic has rung, and the responsibility of the living to choose life. B+