As an ash sea. Love and errors, ivory towers and theoretically escapes. Social chains and sandy expectations. A young man - axis of small society. A sentimental adventure, the sick and the good ways. A french novel about values and sentimental windows. Scarfs of past and future as Persian carpet. Emmanuelle Beart in skin of reed-character. A film about AIDS and decisions. About search of life sense and answers behind the words. Death as scrub. And the sound of things who makes measure of feelings. Fresco of a world, it is interesting for the art of director and for interesting cast. And, more that, for the final taste. For the traces of its parts - mirrors in fact.

For almost an hour this French story of love and its dynamics slogs along painfully, its object obscured. A policeman of Islamic descent has married a young woman partly for her money. She doesn't care. He's a sexual dynamo. She doesn't even care that he sees other women -- or a man, for that matter.The other man is an innocent-looking young gay guy who is having an affair with a gay doctor, interrupted now by the attentions of the police officer.Everyone goes around shrugging shoulders and gesticulating except the doctor who is fiercely jealous and has lost his young lover. It's all rather comme ci, comme ca, until finally a brief announcement is seen on TV that a mysterious disease is spreading among the gay community.The young man has it, the others don't. The whole business is treated without melodrama and without any overt attempts to engage the viewer emotionally, except insofar as we are saddened by the illness of the innocent young man and we share the anxiety of those who have made love with him. Amor vincit omnia, and then you roll over and go to sleep.I found the sexual juggling a little boring. I didn't really care much who wound up with whom. And the way AIDS was treated was something of a disappointment. Neither moral nor medical questions were raised. It was as if something had intruded into a couple of love affairs and the consequences, though tragic, were also a damned nuisance.The photography is crisp and evocative, the direction efficient, the budget modest. If this doesn't achieve all it seems to have set out for, I still wish there were more efforts made along these lines. My God, what an improvement it is over another Batman movie!I wish the characters had been made more engaging. As it is, I wound up feeling as if I were watching them through the wrong end of a telescope.

Les Témoins (The Witnesses) is another fine artwork by French director André Téchiné that continues to examine relationships in times of stress and through areas of rough travel. As written by Téchiné, Laurent Guyot, and Viviane Zingg this film is a love story and a social commentary on life in 1984 when AIDS raised its ugly head and disrupted lives, hopes and relationships. What could have been a heavy-handed woeful tale is instead a story about ordinary people and how the spectre of the then 'new disease' affected a small group of friends. In the intimacy of the story there is an opportunity to reflect and to see more clearly the atmosphere of that time in history. Sarah (Emmanuelle Béart) is a writer of children's books married to Mehdi (Sami Bouajila), a member of the Paris police force vice squad. They have an open marriage and have just given birth to a baby boy - a factor that disrupts their separate lives while conflicting their married life. Sarah has a physician friend Adrien (Michel Blanc, so memorable in his role in 'Monsieur Hire') who is gay, and while he is older, he still longs for the company of young men. Adrien meets the young catering student Manu (Johan Libéreau), a lad whose sexual appetite is satisfied by trysts in parks, back rooms of bars, etc. Manu and his opera singer sister Julie (Julie Depardieu) live modestly in a sleazy hotel cum brothel that is under surveillance by Mehdi. Adrien and Manu strike up a friendship and are invited to join Sarah and Mehdi to Sarah's mother's cabin by the sea and while there a relationship between Manu and Mehdi begins, one that will become an affair in secret. A strange disease comes to public attention and it is Adrien who is in charge of the investigation of the disease now called AIDS. Though Adrien's ties with Manu have become platonic while Manu see Mehdi daily, Adrien is the first to notice lesions on Manu, lesions that are the hallmark of AIDS. How this discovery affects the lives of each of the characters we have met (the 'witnesses' to a very important time in our history) serves as the crux of the story - part tragedy and part a torch of resilience the weaves the story to a close in an honest, touching but never maudlin manner. The acting is consistently excellent, the sort of ensemble acting that keeps the focus on the message of the film rather than on individual attention to characters. The movie is beautifully photographed by Julien Hirsch and the musical score by Philippe Sarde wisely blends excerpts from Vivaldi and Mozart with original music that recalls the 1980s. This is yet another triumph for André Téchiné - a film that deserves the widest possible audience. Grady Harp

There is much potential for this to be made into a great film with flashes of brilliant ideas - a young homosexual who sells himself for sex lives with his budding opera singer of a sister; yet this relationship is barely touched upon, and her character barely developed. A Muslim cop married to an atheist writer who struggles with maternity; a lonely and ageing doctor who watches his would-be lover contract HIV.This film is a perfect example of how to write a bad screenplay -- every scene in which there is dialogue is an argument. The characters are haphazardly portrayed, and whole chunks of storytelling are left up to our imagination. Our homosexual protagonist seems to travel through wormholes between Paris and south of France, as he is poor, and we never see him drive, fly, or take the train. Seaons come and go faster than the characters and relationships develop. We are given glimpses into a female writer's life, yet the reason why she is a writer is of little to no importance to the story, and there is only a suggestion of what she writes. The dreary, stilted arguments, where the script leaves no subtext or nuance for the actors to work with make soap operas seem high brow.