A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Monday, August 20, 2018

My Dinner With Andre (Louis Malle, 1981)

Jean Lenauer, Wallace Shawn, and Andre Gregory in My Dinner With Andre
Andre Gregory: Andre Gregory
Wallace Shawn: Wallace Shawn
Waiter: Jean Lenauer
Bartender: Roy Butler

Director: Louis Malle
Screenplay: Wallace Shawn, Andre Gregory
Cinematography: Jeri Sopanen
Production design: David Mitchell
Film editing: Suzanne Baron
Music: Allen Shawn

How interesting that a film that has no story of its own should be such an engaging tribute to the power of storytelling. Having realized that My Dinner With Andre is going to be just watching two rather ordinary-looking men having dinner in a nicely appointed but not particularly unusual restaurant, we have to supply our own visuals. That is, we supplement what's on screen with our imagined visualizations of the stories Andre Gregory tells Wallace Shawn about his travels. Gregory is such an artful raconteur that our task is easy, and we conjure up our own versions of his experiences in a Polish forest, the Sahara desert, the Findhorn community in Scotland, and an especially weird Halloween on Long Island. But Shawn is not a sponge: He's us, a bit skeptical, willing to affirm "Enlightenment values" and ordinary life against Gregory's spiritual enthusiasms and dodgy adventures. Meanwhile, we're also watching the men eat -- or perhaps not eat, for I grew rather impatient with their ignoring the meal they have ordered. And we're watching the ambience, the comings and goings of the restaurant, the waiter and bartender and the servers in the background -- and sometimes the foreground, for director Louis Malle has provided flickers of action as people pass between the camera and the Shawn-Gregory table. The designers have also cleverly positioned a mirror over the table, so that we get glimpses of people other than our interlocutors. Malle uses this mirror smartly toward the end of the film when we see the waiter standing still in the mirror and realize, before Shawn and Gregory do, that the staff is waiting to close up, delayed only by their conversation. That so much can be made out of so little is one of the surprises and delights of My Dinner With Andre. For some people, I know, it's like a film about watching paint dry, but I find it a small triumph of unconventional filmmaking.
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