AIDS and
accusations

>> Two new French films
tackle heavy subjects

by MALCOLM FRASER

Les Témoins

In this drama from director André Téchiné, set in the early ’80s, Adrien (Michel Blanc) is a middle-aged Parisian doctor with a taste for young male companions. The latest of these is Manu (Johan Libéreau), a fresh-faced recent arrival from the provinces who crashes with his sister, opera singer Julie (Julie Depardieu). A second storyline follows Blanc’s friends, a couple with an open marriage—vice detective Mehdi (Sami Bouajila) and Sarah (Emmanuelle Béart), a child of privilege and frustrated writer who blithely neglects their infant son as she struggles to work on a novel.

What starts off as a typical French romantic-entanglement drama turns darker with the arrival of the AIDS virus, which affects all the characters to different degrees. But instead of using the bourgeois soap-operatic couplings to explore the deeper themes that the epidemic brings with it, Téchiné seems to do the opposite; the virus is backdrop to the drama, which comes off as a bit distasteful. There are also a lot of subplots which go don’t go anywhere—Depardieu’s character, in particular, is puzzlingly irrelevant to the story—giving the impression that the film should have either been much longer, or else had a ruthless editor take a hatchet to it.

Les Témoins is beautifully shot, with a widescreen image and brilliant colours, and Libéreau and Béart both spend quite a bit of time showing off their nubile bodies, so there’s a lot of aesthetic pleasure to be had, but the human drama is ultimately unsatisfying.

Contre-enquête

The police procedural genre has taken a bit of a beating from the ceaseless variations (if you can call them that) of the CSI and Law & Order franchises. These have established a standardized portrait of criminal investigation whose unrelenting reliance on formula is comforting to some, boring as hell to others. Meanwhile, superior narrative dramas like The Wire and The Sopranos have set the bar for portraying crime and punishment almost impossibly high. All of which is to say that a police film has to be highly original to be worth the while. The new French thriller Contre-enquête sadly fails on this count.

Richard (Jean Dujardin), a Paris detective, loses his young daughter when she wanders off while he’s busy working and gets raped and killed. Daniel (Laurent Lucas) is arrested and convicted shortly after. A year later, when Dujardin starts getting letters from Lucas protesting his innocence, something compels him to take up the case anew. He becomes obsessed with getting Lucas out, to the detriment of his personal and professional life, and seemingly missing the indicators that Lucas is hiding something.

Director Franck Mancuso seems to be going for an old-fashioned Hitchcock-style thriller, but the elements don’t gel. Without either the realism that makes characters believable or the operatic grandeur that makes them larger than life, you end up with stock stereotypes. There’s a twist ending that’s clever only in comparison to the rest of the film’s predictability; otherwise, it’s humourlessly cynical, replete with clichés and unforgivably mediocre overall.

Both films open this
Friday, Feb. 29

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