My Dinner With Andre

I have never understood the high critical esteem with which Louis Malle’s film is regarded. Not that it is really Malle’s film in any auteurial sense but rather it belongs to co-writers and “stars” (an oddly incongruous term for the two leads), Wallace Shawn and André Gregory as for nearly two hours over dinner in a posh restaurant the pair have a conversation that, roughly speaking, might be described as being dedicated to the meaning of life.

Wally, as Shawn tells us in an introductory narration is a small-time playwright who takes acting jobs when he can get them to make ends.  André, his former mentor, is a once innovative theatre director who has effectively dropped out of the scene and been on a five year globe-trotting  spiritual odyssey.  He is having dinner with André at the urging of a mutual friend who had encountered André sobbing uncontrollably because he had been so moved by the line in Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sonata in which a character says, ''I could always live in my art, but never in my life''.

The latter sounds like a line in a Woody Allen comedy but as there no gags or one-liners here, one is never sure how comedic My Dinner With Andre is intended to be, with Shawn with his gnomic looks (he was famously described by Allen in Manhattan as a “homunculus’) an uncomfortable interlocuter given to occasional squeals of nervous laughter and Gregory waxing loquacious about his adventures in search of pure being in the forests of Poland and other far-flung locales.  

With a script apparently assembled from hundreds of hours of conversations between the two the idea seems to be rather to present a common-place colloquy between two middle-aged men of the arts, one a mild mannered “little’ man happy enough with his humdrum routine, knocking out the occasional play, the other, an idealist and a spiritual searcher (of independent means) for whom penetrating the veil is the only true purpose of art.  The trouble is that in the absence of Allenish bon-mots or philosophical profundities, their conversation, by the very nature of it supposedly being true-to-life, is an ad hoc ramble across commonplace ideas, one which is only slightly relieved in the latter stages by Wally’s rankling at Andre’s cavalier dismissal of the “average man” and by implication himself, as having a life not lived.  

With his background in French New Wave cinema, which has more than its fair share of talky films, Malle was a good choice for director and for all the limitations of the set-up, largely, two men seated at a table, surprisingly, one never tires from the cinematically-limited scope of the film. 

Seen in a most benign light, My Dinner With Andre is an Ozu-like slice of the human comedy and I assume that is how its admirers see it. Less indulgent viewers may simply find it at a minimum, too long. Personally I'm impressed by the simplicity of the concept, which with a $5m box office on the back of rapturous critical response presumably left the authors comfortably well-off.

 

Want something different?