Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 08/04/19

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, August 4, 2019

The Witnesses (André Téchiné, 2007)

Johan Libéreau and Sami Bouajila in The Witnesses

Cast: Michel Blanc, Emmanuelle Béart, Sami Bouajila, Johan Libéreau, Julie Depardieu, Constance Dollé, Lorenzo Balducci, Alain Cauchi. Screenplay: André Téchiné, Laurent Guyot, Viviane Zingg. Cinematography: Julien Hirsch. Production design: Michèle Abbé-Vannier. Film editing: Martine Giordano. Music: Philippe Sarde.

The time is 1984, and AIDS has just begun to make its menace completely known in the small circle of friends who constitute André Téchiné's "witnesses." They include Sarah (Emmanuelle Béart) and Mehdi (Sami Bouajila), a married couple with a baby; Adrien (Michel Blanc), their middle-aged doctor friend; and Manu (Johan Libéreau), a gay man who is Adrien's protégé (i.e., he loves the young man but they don't have sex). Eventually, Manu will contract AIDS, complicating things because he and Mehdi have begun having sex. Téchiné works out all of these complications with a beautiful deftness that avoids sugarcoating the fatal epidemic but still manages to leave viewers with a satisfactory resolution.