The Witnesses

"We're floundering in ridicule," opines one character in French director Andre Techine's pensive meditation on the ravages of the 1980s AIDS epidemic on France's gay community.

The trouble is he's right. Techine attempts to document the terrible events that saw AIDS strike just as homosexuality was gaining an acceptance and transparency in most parts of French society.

The powerful backlash against the disease saw vicious demonisation of gays in the media and a portrayal of the virus as some sort of shameful gay plague.

However, Techine's characters, as they struggle to understand the disease, never seem real and the complex emotional circumstances in which they find themselves just don't ring true.

The predatory Manu is a young free spirit who arrives in Paris and soon finds himself ploughing through the undergrowth in the city parks' gay cruising spots.

There he bumps into Adrien (Blanc) a middle-aged doctor who bears more than a passing resemblance to Benny Hill's little bald head-patted sidekick Jackie Wright.

However, Manu only offers a platonic relationship because he's set his cap at Adrien's chum Mehdi (Sami Bouajila), a handsome police chief in the, er, vice squad.

He's in an "open relationship" with children's writer Emmanuelle Beart (whose magnificent performing breasts, you'll be glad to hear, are often in action) but Manu can't be too sure which way he's going to swing.

As luck would have it, Manu's hopes that Mehdi swings both ways are realised after the pair take a trip above the clouds in Mehdi's private plane (what sort of salaries as Parisian coppers on?). Then tragedy strikes.

To his credit, Techine never lapses into morbid sentimentality and it's interesting for a film to put the horror of AIDs in the 1980s in the perspective of a viewpoint 20-odd years on.

However, you never really buy these characters or their predicaments.

Tim Evans