When we moviegoers talk about "Frenchness," what are we talking about? Language? Nationality? No, it's a question of sensibility, a question no one raises higher than director Andr? T?chin? ("Wild Reeds," "Thieves," "Alice and Martin"). What makes his movies French is precisely what would make them impossible anywhere else: a recognition that people are not the selfless stuff of Hollywood melodrama, but driven, self-interested, inevitably egocentric -- and thus the stuff of paradox: The good they do is done in spite of what they are.

In "The Witnesses," Techine levels his gaze on the '80s, an era of seeming innocence, perhaps license, and one in which biological freedom has led to a loose, even sloppily knit fabric of humanity. Sarah (Emmanuelle B?art) is a children's author who refuses to let her newborn interrupt the writing of her first novel. Her North African husband, Mehdi (Sami Bouajila), is a member of the police vice squad with his own hidden vices. His prime target is a hotel where Julie (Julie Depardieu) lives and Sandra (Constance Doll?) works. Adrien (the terrific Michel Blanc) is a gay doctor who cruises the Bois de Boulogne, and during one evening's sojourn discovers the movie's good-looking catalyst -- Julie's brother Manu (Johan Lib?reau), a recent arrival to Paris, who will become Adrien's friend, Mehdi's lover and Sarah's torment.

None of the characters is a complete or uncomplicated animal, but they accommodate each other's differences, at least until insurmountable crises occur. These include Manu and Mehdi's affair (inaugurated on Bastille Day, lest anyone misconstrue T?chin?'s sentiments) and the onset of the AIDS battle, in which Adrien becomes a front-line soldier and everyone else becomes a real or potential victim.

"The Witnesses" is a timely reminder of AIDS; we've largely forgotten we're in the midst of a crisis. But the movie isn't all cautionary, or at all preachy. It approaches individuals who remain just that, regardless of the history they're living through. That history can't be ignored. But it doesn't dictate their destinies either.

-- John Anderson (March 14, 2008)

Contains sex, nudity and vulgarity.