Battles, both literal and metaphorical, have dominated André Téchiné’s last three films: Strayed (2003) saw Emmanuelle Béart and her children fleeing German planes in 1940; Changing Times (2004) featured Gerard Depardieu trying to win back romantically intransigent Catherine Deneuve at any cost. In the director’s bold The Witnesses, set in 1984–85, the body itself becomes a battleground. Or, as Adrien, a gay physician spearheading AIDS research, says to Sarah, a straight female friend, “You’re in love and I’m at war.” Within the film’s foursome—Sarah is a novelist who has a child with vice cop Mehdi, who begins a torrid affair with Manu, a country bumpkin who befriends Adrien while cruising in a park his first night in Paris—dyads will form, split, and recoalesce, particularly after Adrien discovers KS lesions on Manu’s chest. Like Wild Reeds (1994), Téchiné’s film about two young men falling in love during the Algerian War, The Witnesses brilliantly combines the personal and the political, and is one of the rare films about the early years of the AIDS crisis. Beyond gay versus straight, Techiné’s film is equally committed to exploring other opposites: rich vs. poor, male vs. female, Muslim vs. non-Muslim.