One Place Only: My Dinner with André (Dir Louis Malle, 1h55m, 1981)
Two men sit down in a restaurant and talk, almost uninterrupted, for two hours. The two men are playing barely fictionalised versions of themselves-both of them are actors, and one of them is a director of plays- they have not seen each other since the director gave up his profession in 1975, and disappeared from New York. The two men are André Gregory and Wallace Shawn, also responsible for the script, are friends and colleagues for over a decade before the making of the film, their dinner-table discussion largely drawing on their real-life experiences since Gregory's midlife crisis, discussing Gregory's journey of self discovery across the world and his subsequent emerging world view to which Shawn acts as critic, sounding board and sympathetic ear at once. Enter Wallace Shaun, and one of the greatest opening monologues in dramatic cinema, recounting his youth, as the son of William Shaun, the editor of the New Yorker, a halcyon teens where "when I was ten...a...
