“Dinner with Andre’”: Towards a New Cinema

The Cooper Point Journal Volume 10, Issue 23 (May 13, 1982)

My Dinner with Andre with Andre Gregory, Wallace Shawn, directed by Louis Malle from a script by Gregory and Shawn.

“People in their lives now are performing so well performance in the theater is sort of superfluous and in a way obscene… Do views of isolation and horrific images wake up sleeping audience? No? We need a new language, a language of the heart, a language between people … a poetry” — Gregory to Shawn

Homo simulator: man the simulating animal. In the space of just the past 5 or 10 years Western man has entered a new epoch. For the first time in the history of our civilization, through the medium of film, we can now simulate any and everything imaginable, in two dimensions at least, with a degree of extreme credibility. Do you want to see aliens combating in the black holes of the furthest reaches of the universe? You can see it. Do you want to watch Nastassia Kinski metamorphose before your eyes into a black panther? It’s been done. Glimpses of yesterday complete with costume reproductions accurate down to the actor’s eyeteeth; visions of tomorrow without guidelines or abrupt segways to camouflage the filmmakers inadequacies. What we have now on the screen is the absolute event or a very reasonable facsimile thereof.

What then do Gregory, Shawn and Malle attempt to recreate? A conversation over dinner at a restaurant in New York City. Why? Because as everything is possible now everything must be done. Even more importantly, as we strive to depict the fabulous we lose sight of what is really of paramount interest: our mundane sometimes trivial and absurd but real and essential lives. What ultimately is more crucial and timely than the warm interaction befitting two men whose lives fate has seen to entwine?

Andre’s historical antecedents are clear in the work of the French filmmakers of the 60s and 70s in general and Jean-Luc Godard’s and Jean Eustache’s (The Mother and the Whore) in particular. The concept of cinéma vérité (cinema of truth) wherein the “slice of life” is central has at last made its American debut on a large scale here in Malle’s work.

The dangers of this type of view or manifold pandering as it does to the narcissistic impulses of all involved then in the production. Happily, amazingly, Andre doesn’t fall into this trap.

The plot of Andre could hardly be simpler. Two middle-aged men, former close friends and colleagues in the theater, meet over dinner for the first time in 5 years. During the course of the meal, first Gregory then Shawn open forth in an effort to establish true lines of communication. Dinner ends and the two go their separate ways. We follow Shawn part of the way home where he will meet his girlfriend Debbie and tell her all about his dinner with Andre.

What we see then is 2 hours of conversation. The fact that these two men, Gregory and Shawn, are playing themselves on screen, that in fact they are close friends, is something more than curious. This may, in fact, point to a new genre emerging in our country. If so, one hopes the future directors will learn from the example of Andre; from its complete absence of pretense and from its total lack of self-indulgence. Hopefully too the spirit of the film– a yearning for optimism and hope– will be remembered as a viable goal in these future productions.

Hopefully too Andre‘s problem will be seeing clearly. Though doing a good job of enunciating the contemporary dilemmas, (man’s divorce from his environment and the isolation from each other; how comfort lulls us into a dangerous trance) Andre doesn’t go very far towards reaching a solution. These are the same topics we all have been kicking around since adolescence and I can remember better and more far-reaching conversations with friends over some good reefer back in my salad days.

Which brings me back to another point; when Gregory speaks about his travels to the Sahara to Tibet and the forests of Poland where he sees images of super worldly creatures and hears voices addressing him from out of the air, one must wonder just what drugs he was on. This topic never gets approached.
If little wiser for their years, at least Gregory and Shawn are not dull, and that is no mean feed for a 2-hour conversation. Gregory is warm, his face animates his thoughts wonderfully. When he gets rolling, talking paragraphs in a New York second, his hands fairly fly across the table, drawing us in. Shawn, slow to warm up to his eccentric friend, is doubly effective when, near the end of the film, he lets himself go. Shawn comes across as a mirthful and much put- upon cherub and captures our heart like it did the older woman leaving the theater who said “He’s so cute. I just wanted to bring him home with me.”

Andre, to use the tired platitude, is a unique movie experience. If I’m right, it is the first in a series which may yet be the best cinema this country has ever produced. If the moment stops here at least one shining sample of quiet beneficence will be preserved.

My Dinner with Andre is currently showing at the Village Cinemas in Tacoma, 88th and South Tacoma Way. 1-582-0028.