My Dinner with Andre (1981)
Directed by Louis Malle
Wally, a struggling playwright and actor, reluctantly agrees to catch up with his old friend Andre, a theater director who disappeared several years prior in order to travel the world. Meeting at a posh Manhattan restaurant, the two share life stories, anecdotes and philosophical musings over the course of an evening meal.
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What critics compared My Dinner with Andre to
The effect is that, as in My Dinner with Andre, we are staring at diffuse images but our brains are focused on Locke's conversations, perhaps trying to picture faces, or a football match, or a concrete pour.
Then again, some people might think of something even smaller and more obscure, like Louis Malle’s “My Dinner with Andre,” where the audience becomes enraptured with the fascinating dinner conversation.
But if this scripted literal "conversation piece" by and between Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory made for a convenient punchline, a shorthand for artistic snobbery, it was also acutely self-aware and just as much thought-provoking, offering a progressive cinematic paradigm that would later sustain pictures like Richard Linklater's Before series (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight).
What ensues is an ambulatory My Dinner With André for lovers -- a captivating and seamless discussion in which Jesse and Celine unravel the past while flirting with romantic possibility.
The story of a young American (Ethan Hawke) and a beautiful French jeune fille (Julie Delpy) who meet on a train and slip into a deep-thought conversation with an intensely sexual subtext, it was like a non-platonic My Dinner With Andre, a romantic daydream distilled to 190 proof: One sip made you reel.
Think My Dinner with Andre, but with better looking stars in a more photogenic surrounding.
In 1981 Louis Malle made the successful "My Dinner With Andre," wherein two old friends sit and talk and talk and talk over dinner.
It was also that rare American film keener on talk than on plot, a My Dinner With Andre in which Andre turned out to be a whip-smart, sexy French babe.
CARNAGE 3 stars (out of 4) Stars: Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, John C. Reilly, Christoph Waltz Rated: R for language How long: 1 hour 19 minutes Opens: Friday at Sundance For fans of: "My Dinner With Andre," "Crimes and Misdemeanors," PTO meetings that turn into shouting matches…
It works more along the lines of something like My Dinner With Andre (1981) or Mindwalk (1991) than it does Clerks (1994).
"Dogma" is a hulking slice of Zeitgeist contagion, energized to the hilt by a vast, wisecracking cast that makes "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World" look like "My Dinner With Andre."
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In the vein of Locke and My Dinner with Andre , it isn’t exactly a one-man show fronted by Jakob Cedergren, but works as well as it does thanks to director Gustav Möller’s taut editing, voice cast, and sound effects that create a haunting scene halfway through the film without a drop of onscreen blood.
But then the men’s conversation shifts gears, and so too do their implications: first a passing reference to Alice in Wonderland, then an argument over coincidence versus fate.
Shawn is the more immediately recognizable of the two because of his work as a film actor; at the time of the film’s release, he was best known for a small role in Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979), but has since come to be identified most often with his role as the hilariously egocentric Vizzini in The Princess Bride (1987) and as the much put-upon speech teacher in Clueless (1995).
In the juiciest roles, Smith, Pine, and Moore stand out, but perhaps most especially Shawn, who surprises with a performance of astonishing feeling, muscularity, and nuance that's a far cry from his Hollywood typecasting as a clownish stuffed shirt (in films like The Princess Bride and Clueless).
We listen in on a series of talking heads who expound about life in far-less interesting ways than My Dinner with Andre.
It's like an admonishment to the audience, but it's not necessary; this fascinating experiment in animation and philosophizing has the same invigorating, something-new-under-the-sun crackle of "My Dinner With Andre."
When the questions are posed by representations (cartoon figures) of representations (characters in a film) of humanity, our perception of what washes out as a slacker version of My Dinner with Andre melded, if also at literal odds, with The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is undermined and destabilized.
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The epistemological alarmism seems more boringly spacey today than it did in the '80s (Gregory's assertion that U.S. citizens live in “a dream world” has been turgidly echoed in every sci-fi adaptation of Plato's allegory of the cave), but the manner in which Gregory and Shawn challenge the artifice of modern comfort is far more pithy, and less epic (i.e. less Judeo-Christian) than either The Matrix or a textual/cultural antecedent like Salinger's Franny and Zooey.
Scream 4 is not My Dinner With André —the dialogue often drifts from snappy to functional (has anyone ever said the word cyberspace out loud?) and the actors sometimes sound as if they're still in rehearsal.