It was a quiet evening last night when I decided to watch My Dinner with Andre. I’d been avoiding it for literally years. A movie that was just two people having a conversation at a restaurant? It sounded so unusual. Sure, I’d read the reviews, seen it mentioned in lists of great films. But somehow I wasn’t sure I wanted to watch a movie like that. When I was younger I saw classic movies all the time, but now it seemed as though I only watched television comedies and superhero blockbusters. The prospect of sitting down for a couple hours with Wallace Shawn sitting down for a couple hours with Andre… it made me nervous.
The restaurant set was elegant, nicely lit. Classier than you’d expect a small film like this to afford. As the two actors sat down to order, I realized that the bulk of the film would be right here, at this table, mostly in a handful of two-shots and close-ups. Waiters hovered in the background, refilling drinks as needed, pretending not to listen. I felt like one of them, observing a private dinner between two former friends who had lost touch. Sometimes the staff and I couldn’t help but betray our reactions to the scene, as we listened to Andre talk.
Much of the film consisted of his monologue, a long and absorbing story about a series of foreign adventures Andre had had, attempts to find himself, or life, or himself in his life. A theater director, he had taught an acting class to students in a forest without knowing their language; had journeyed through a harsh desert as preparation for a play he never produced; had participated himself in a kind of living work of theater meant to remind him of the closeness of death.
Like Wallace I listened intently, sometimes amused, sometimes intrigued, always fascinated by the gentle tones of Andre’s voice, the casual lyricism of his descriptions. There was something melancholy in his tale, a story of connections made but also questioned. Had Andre’s experiences really changed him?
Wallace’s responses gave voice to my own doubts, as the camerawork shifted to focus on the smaller man, picking up details around the table, suggesting associations with the discussion. In Wallace’s slightly fumbling attempts to defend the values of everyday society, the comforts of modern living, the usefulness of the scientific method, the potential for self-awareness at home as well as in the exotic places to which Andre had travelled—in these I sensed Wallace’s ambivalence. Perhaps he feared that Andre was correct, that society was full of the living dead, not questioning their emotional deadness and their moral self-delusion. Perhaps he feared what confronting those ideas might mean… or not confronting them. Maybe he would simply let their suggestion of a richer life slip away at the end of the night, cleared away from the table like the dishes at the end of the meal.
As the film wound down to its ending and Wallace left Andre to take a cab home through the city streets, it seemed to me that no conclusions had been definitively drawn in their discussion. Yet the time I had spent with them in the restaurant, listening to two men talk to one another for a couple of hours, made me appreciate this more cinematic coda. The director’s grainy film stock picked out details of the New York night passing by the cab’s window. A gentle piano melody expressed warmth and wistfulness as Wallace contemplated the effect that the conversation had had on him—so quotidian an event, and yet so profound the feeling. Perhaps he had found a way to a moment of self-awareness, of waking from the dream of the everyday to a new appreciation of life, of this moment. Perhaps I too had been reminded of the value of films about ideas and experiences rather than stories, of quiet fascination as opposed to the typical bombastic thrills so common in modern cinema. I felt that, like Wallace, I had had a singular experience. And I couldn’t wait to tell you about my evening with My Dinner With Andre.
https://youtu.be/elQBVpTgFis