“My Dinner with Andre”
Does anyone talk about Louis Malle anymore? It’s been more than thirty years since Ebert wrote that he “seems to dare himself to find acceptable ways of filming unacceptable subjects.” He was talking about “Pretty Baby,” a film about an older man and the pre-teen daughter of a Storyville prostitute. (He was probably also referring to “Murmur of the Heart,” a rather gentle treatment of incest.)
I admit I’ve only seen three of Malle’s movies — “Au Revoir Les Enfants,” which remains, to my mind, the most moving film about the Holocaust; “Atlantic City,” the romance of an aging gambler and a junkie’s girl in old-school Jersey; and now “My Dinner with Andre.”
And having seen them, I think I know what that “acceptable” way is. There’s an unforced, attentive quality to Malle’s filmmaking, as though the camera were paying so close attention to these characters that it quite forgot itself. There’s no character to act as judge, no plot device to punish or reward. He simply listens.
Listening is the chief activity in “My Dinner with Andre,” which consists of one long conversation between two friends in the New York theater scene. They’re real friends talking in real time, after years of separation, about why Andre dropped his directing career, vanished abroad, and became known as a most peculiar man.
The avuncular Andre has a soothing voice and a friendly twinkle; you’d think he was advising a kid about college, not admitting he saw a blue beast by the altar at Christmas with pansies sprouting out of its eyes. Once a successful director, he talks of finding a Japanese monk to play “The Little Prince” in the Sahara with only themselves for an audience, and hosting “workshops” in a Polish forest that involve dancing and emoting at random with strangers who speak no English. Oh, and getting buried alive. These activities help Andre cut past the routine, the artificiality, the falsity of New York life. His crisis of faith, as it were, ends with his ability to feel and respond more authentically in his own life.
Observing that he was finally able to express his annoyance with his wife, he adds:
And when I allowed myself to consider the possibility of not spending the rest of my life with Chiquita, I realized that what I wanted most in life was to always be with her. But at that time I hadn’t learned what it would be like to let yourself react to another human being. And if you can’t react to another person then there’s no possibility of action or interaction. And if there isn’t, I don’t really know what the word “love” means, except “duty,” “obligation,” “sentimentality,” “fear.”
Meanwhile, his friend Wally listens for three-quarters of the film with a “Hmm” and a “So then what happened?” and, now and then, a baffled look. (You may know Wallace Shawn as the portly assassin in “The Princess Bride,” as a son of the New Yorker editor William Shawn, or a playwright in his own right, which is how he appears here.) Wally allows that he doesn’t always see the falsity of role-playing in his life.
But finally Wally bursts out: “”I just don’t know how anybody could enjoy anything more than I enjoy reading Charlton Heston’s autobiography, or, you know, getting up in the morning and having the cup of cold coffee that’s been waiting for me all night, still there for me to drink in the morning! …I just don’t think I feel the need for anything more than all this. Whereas, you know, you seem to be saying that it’s inconceivable that anybody could be having a meaningful life today.”
He concludes: “I know what you’re talking about, but I don’t really know what you’re talking about.”
From one man’s midlife crisis, the conversation veers into talk of Martin Heidegger and Buber, Bertolt Brecht and V. Gordon Craig. The Brecht reference is an apt one. Andre mentions Brecht’s “alienation effect” that creates a sense of distance between the viewers and the play, a distance that helps them approach the play intellectually rather than being played by it emotionally. “My Dinner with Andre” uses this effect to advantage. At first, the viewer seems to participate in the film, sharing Wally’s normal-guy point-of-view, his status as a listener, and literally, what he sees. We spend much of the movie looking at Andre’s face, since he is usually the one talking.
When Wally starts to talk back, the camera cuts away to show both men from a greater distance. The viewer’s sense of participating in the action is disrupted; the scene calls attention to the viewer’s status as an onlooker who is now hearing two arguments. Where viewers once shared Wally’s point-of-view, they are now called on to consider both.
I imagine there’s something to be said about the actors, who have the same names as the characters, playing “themselves” in a movie that explicitly critiques role-playing as an inauthentic mode of being. Or something about the popularity of this film in the early 1980s despite the apparently risky device of the real-time chat. I’m sorry if I find the conceit rather dated and the matter rather like a late-night conversation in my dorm, once-upon-a-time, with smart, insulated theater kids. I confess, when I was drafting this post, I got so distracted that I veered off into a discussion of the most effective films about WII-era trauma, and why. I’ll see if I can shape that material about “Au Revoir, Les Enfants” — another Malle movie – and “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” into another post.
