Review of My Dinner with Andre (1981) by Al M — 24 Jun 2011

My Dinner with Andre is not a film that most people will like. It is an experimental film from French New Wave auteur Louis Malle (Au Revoir Les Enfants) with a rather simple premise and structure: the entire film except for a few opening moments of setup and few seconds of closure depicts the real-time dinner conversation between Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, both playwrights who play fictional versions of themselves in this film.

Once the two are seated at dinner about 5 minutes into the film, the camera never leaves their table or conversation. The pair discuss the state of theater, existential questions, and the pair's philosophies about life.

Wallace is a mild-mannered, quite little man who attempts to eek out an existence with his girlfriend while still being able to write plays. Andre, on the other hand, is a more flamboyant world traveler who monopolizes the conversation with his tales of abandoning theater, jaunting to various remote corners of the world, and engaging in a variety of strange rituals, experiments, and other life experiences.

While this may sound boring, the film is actually a riveting dialectic between two intellectuals who reflect on society and identity from the viewpoint of the marginal status that the theater grants them.

Perhaps those who don't find philosophy and aesthetic theory interesting will find the film a bore, but I think that it actually builds towards a rather compelling climax in which the two differ radically on their fundamental viewpoints about existence, life, and art.

A powerful, mesmerizing film that demonstrates how quiet, almost transparent direction can create truly stirring works of genuine, philosophical beauty. Like watching a Socratic dialogue in action or having the most intellectually stimulating evening of your life, My Dinner with Andre remains a powerfully original film that attests to Malle's status as one of the cinema's great masters.