My Dinner with Andre (1981)

Too many fans seem to be blown away

Tied for the best movie I have ever seen

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

And, what is 1981's "My Dinner With Andre" all about - You may ask??Well - If you can imagine yourself as a customer at a fancy-schmancy restaurant and you are sitting at a table next to the likes of Boris Karloff and Elmer Fudd who are engaging in a rather loud, half-assed conversation - That should give you a pretty good idea of this film's plot-line.For me - The bulk of the conversation that took place between this film's 2 less-than-dynamic characters was certainly far from being anything coming close to real "meat and potatoes" talk. That's for sure. In fact - I found it to be just "watery soup" rantings and ravings for the most part.After having to endure paying attention to 80 minutes of Andre's incessant babble and kitchen-counter philosophy (while Wallace listened on with the keenest of interest) was (indeed) a real test of my patience.I mean - This particular chin-wag only started to pick up some significant steam in its last 30 minutes. And by that point I was way too bored to care one way or the other about what was being said between the likes of Boris and Elmer here.

This movie exudes intelligent dialogue and thought. Every time I watch this movie I start contemplating how I have lived my life (currently 75). I definitely lived like Wally but now wished I had been Andre. It has made me realize that thinking outside the box is necessary to fully enjoy one's being alive.

Two old friends meet for dinner; as one tells anecdotes detailing his experiences, the other notices their differing worldviews.This is very much an indie film -- lots of dialogue (and I do mean lots), overly intellectual discourse, and very limited settings (more or less a single table). I am almost surprised this came out in 1981, because it is very much along the lines of the sort of dialogue-heavy indie film we saw in the 1990s.Most interestingly is Wallace Shawn. Maybe it is simply my age, but I was not aware of his existence before "The Princess Bride". And yet, here is he, a full-fledged writer and star of a film. An indie film, but a film just the same... and one honored by the Criterion Collection.

Have you ever caught bribes of such an interesting conversation you couldn't resist the temptation of listening, or even getting involved? Well, as soon as the titular André (Grégory playing himself) talks, we're natural-born listeners. You may think it's a minimalist experimental movie about two men talking, but it's all in the talk. And thanks to Louis Malle's astute directing and André's voice and body language, the words create a whole world and make everything happen in our minds. André, a producer, spent five years discovering the experimental theater in Poland, underground communities in Scotland and monasteries in Tibet, and finally he came back to share his experience with Wallace aka Wally, played by Wallace Shawn. And we visualize everything, the false burial, the hallucinations, the monk standing on his fingers. Despite the film's austere minimalism, what we've got is a super-power to communicate... on an epic level.Next to André, there's Wally, a struggling playwright, in an era where theater is obviously declining. These two men, who don't look the same, one elf-looking, another rather elegant and seductive, share the same love for theater, and certainly arts. They are also rational, literate men in their 30's/40's, and they don't have steady jobs, their revenues don't depend on physical efforts or regular wages, but on talents relying on inspirations, visions and other abstractions. So both Wally and André can afford the luxury of such a conversation, but they're also committed and have material responsibilities. Wally's wife (or girlfriend) must work on night to pay the bills, and André has a family. They're obviously caught between the daily urgency of life, and the eternal quest for its meaning that is so inherent to the world of Arts. Andre was found crying after watching Bergman's "Autumn Sonata" and was moved by Ingrid Bergman's confession that she couldn't only live in her Art, realizing that reality is a double-edged sword with alienating effects.Indeed, in the real world, we all are performers, incapable to express a genuine and sincere sentiment, incapable to question our happiness, beyond all the roles that life affects to us. It's no wonder, people deserted theaters since the world has turn into something like a theater… even a prison camp. But while these statements come later after a series of enumeration of André's five years of self-discovery, they could've turned the conversation into a one-sided performance if it wasn't for Wally's answer.Wally, who struck as a rather passive and fascinated listener, defensively and nervously retorts that there's something innately scary (and no less alienating) in these so-called quests, these obligations to go climb a mountain in order to find meanings to this or that, and then renounce to a simple comfort because it's meaningless. What is extraordinary is how visionary and relevant the conversation is, as if the world was as stressful in 1981 as now, 35 years later, and I couldn't decide which one I could relate to. I was like living my recent life in a movie, and it made me realize that I'm only 4 years younger than Shawn, and I'm in a somewhat similar existential crisis.I find this world extremely oppressive, and the Internet didn't help. Whenever I watched the news, it was always the same bullshit everywhere, the good guys vs. the bad guys, … and when I click on alternate news website, I get twice angrier, angry because we never hear them, and because it might be true. I don't even know if I should cry or laugh about that whole Trump campaign and the fact that we might have a Third World War very soon, … so, I promised myself to live in a bubble and never watch the news or anything that isn't fun and entertaining. I'd rather adopt the cowardly attitude of Wally, because I'm wise enough to know where I don't have the upper hand. I don't know."My Dinner With Andre" doesn't provide answers, but there will be hope as long as people will struggle to find any. I live in France where religion has became the Public Enemy #1, but I think it's again cold rationalism that inspired this intolerance, there's no good or bad spirituality, it's the very quest of transcendence that counts, not the result. The conversation is like those we have with our friends, when we try to solve the world's problem in one night, as long as such conversations will happen, that's enough to restore faith in humanity. Maybe André wasn't sure either about his solutions but it's a friendship story, and it's the mark of friend to unburden himself from his own angst and frustration and allow you to get relieved for some pain you'd have, through talking and communicating. And fittingly, after the dinner, instead of the subway, Wally took the cab and rediscovered some spots that all reminded him of childhood memories. The conversation had an effect, like Saint-Exupéry (whom André often mentioned): Wally started looking with his eyes instead of living mechanically.I can't express with the same quality of words how the film mirrored my own life. Was it a coincidence that the same day, my best friend called me, and urged to decide what to do with my life even if it had to jeopardize my marriage? Like Wally says, just because you read something in a fortune cookie doesn't mean it was addressed to you, but then he mentions the idea of someone traveling in a plane and reading in his horoscope that he shouldn't take it, which was exactly the subject of a screenplay I wrote (!)And André then says that it's only after envisaging the possibility of leaving his wife that he resurrected the passion, as if sometimes you need to take the risk to lose something to realize what it's worth. That night, I embraced my wife as tenderly as I could.