The film, set in Paris in 1984, explores the lives of a closely knit group of friends who are impacted with the sudden outbreak of the AIDS epidemic.

Sarah, a well-to-do writer of children's books, and her working-class husband, Mehdi, an inspector of North African descent, are confronting some marital problems after the recent arrival of their first child.

Sarah, stumbling over a bout of writer's block, has little maternal instinct towards their newborn baby, whose cries she tunes out with earplugs while she works.

Meanwhile, Sarah's close friend Adrien, a middle-aged gay doctor, meets Manu, a carefree young man, at a cruising ground.

Wildly in love with his shallow, narcissistic protégé, Adrien is shrewd enough not to push too hard, but there is an element of masochism in his abject devotion.

Manu, who has recently arrived to Paris from a provincial town in the south of France, shares a space with his sister Julie, while she struggles to affirm herself as an opera singer.

"[2] Commenting about the characters on The Witnesses, Téchiné said: "I prefer people to be moved by Manu when he runs, climbs a tree or burst out laughing than when he is sick.

And it is this sense of miracle that I wanted to conclude and open the film, broadening the horizon by revisiting spaces that Manu has inhabited and rediscovering them without him, with another character traveling through.

[4] The critical consensus is: "André Techiné successfully weaves five gripping stories in an engaging and realistic film about the early days of the AIDS epidemic.

[5] Jan Stuart of Newsday wrote: "André Techiné's The Witnesses is one of the finest fiction-film accounts of a free yet frightful moment in time, when the relaxing sexual liberties of the previous decade were being squeezed by the onset of an unforgiving new virus.

"[6] In Variety Deborah Young commented: "What the characters in The Witnesses -- and the audience -- pay testimony to in André Téchiné's urgent, compassionate, and ultimately optimistic French drama are the toll the epidemic has rung, and the responsibility of the living to choose life".

[7] Nathan Lee in The Village Voice wrote: "Téchiné's triumph of compassion and craft shames the American cinema's indifference to gay history.

In The New York Times, Stephen Holden warned viewers that: "The Witnesses may frustrate those who prefer movies that tell clear-cut stories in which hard lessons are learned.

"[11] David Denby in his review for The New Yorker wrote: "Téchiné is unusually adroit at manipulating a complex set of relations within a very mixed group of people.