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...all I thought about was art and music. Now, I'm 36, and all I think about is money". Shaun walks through the streets of New York, boards a grubby, graffiti'd New York metro. He has spent the day hard at work, his girlfriend has to work in a diner for them to make rent, and all around him is down at heel and grimy, the battered New York of the early 1980s. From this he enters a restaurant, practically summoned by André Gregory, who has arrived back in the city after a period of globe-trotting and soul searching.

The contrast cannot be lost on us-we see Shaun put on his tie, the first of many performative action-and enter the restaurant. He greets Gregory, sits, orders dinner. A second suggestion of a performance, Shaun noting on his internal narration that he will pretend he is a detective, and that he enjoys finding out about people. Shaun's character arrives to us formed by the time André Gregory begins speaking; a realist, who allows himself little flights of fantasy. For the next hour and a half plus, Shaun and Gregory will be practically alone on screen, only occasionally speaking to, or sharing the shot with, the waiter (Jean Lenauer). 

Here we must ask; who are we looking at? Both of them share their names with their characters, both of them share biography with their on-screen roles-André refers to experiences his real-life self had. Yet, both stars are, since the film's release, keen to distance themselves from their roles, even suggesting at one point they should have swapped characters. There is a level of artifice to all this. The restaurant is not the real Café des Artistes-in fact, the film's central third isn't even shot in New York but on a set in Virginia. What we are shown and what the characters are talking about may be based in fact, but it is not fact, Shaun noting in later years that he hates the character he plays on screen, and that the on-screen Wallace Shaun has little to do with the flesh and blood man. This is all very actorly, the precursor to films where actors play a distorted version of themselves; Nicolas Cage's turn as a deadbeat version of himself in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, the metatextual Being John Malkovich among them. 

What cannot be denied is that this is a film about, and inhabited by, theatre. The film is itself theatrical: Shaun's monologue at the beginning and end, a soliloquy against footage of the city is the only time we step outside a single location. Small wonder it's subsequently been performed a number of times as a script reading, most notably in 2019: it is a play, a dialogue, only occasionally interrupted by the occasional appearance of waiting staff, drinks and food. For nearly two hours, two men sit and talk, and yet, director Louis Malle, who approached the central duo and convinced them it could be made, editor Suzanne Baron, Malle's long-time editor, and cinematographer Jeri Sopanen make this nothing short of riveting, as we and Shaun are taken through the extraordinary experiences of André over the last few years, from experimental theatre in Poland to attempts to adapt The Little Prince into a play in the Sahara, to communes in Scotland and being buried alive in Long Island. 

André may make for a good narrator of his own experiences-like Wallace Shaun, we cannot help but hang on his every word-but it is the quiet, low-key shooting and editing, the presence of the film's unheard, unseen, third figure, that of Louis Malle's camera, that make My Dinner with André so engaging, that catch and hold our attentions. It is as powerful a spell, a trance, as the acting "beehive" that André describes at length: like Shaun we are pulled into this improvisational scene with André, where he discusses his experiences and how they have changed his world view. Here, finally, Shaun begins to disagree, to provide counterpoint to André's increasingly grandiose, and increasingly unsettling views of the world. Here, My Dinner With Andre becomes, in some critics' perspective, prescient: André begins to feel like a conspiracy theorist towards the end of the film, speaking of an increasingly mechanised personhood, against which spirituality must act as a torch against an encroaching dark age. 

What is more prescient, even as Wallace rejoins to André's monied adventures around the world, his ability to globe-trot and experience things out of the realms of possibility, even for Shaun's childhood of art and beauty, with the simple luxuries that make us human is this. The dialogue heavy scenes may seem moored in the early 1980s, at a point where a film like this could be made-the idea of something like this being made and released today outside of the art-house seems remote-but its impact can be felt through much of the 1990s, and beyond. Like Twelve Angry Men before it, and dozens of movies since, My Dinner With André is proof that a film in which men sit and talk, and discuss the most powerful ideas in the world, from justice, to belief, and beyond can be as thrilling as any action movie. 
 
Yet, My Dinner With André is more than simply two men sitting down to discuss improvisational theatre, the nature of theatre itself, mid-life crises, spirituality, modernity, the media, and the (un)obtain ability of happiness in the modern world-though, arguably, it is about all of these and more. It is a film about two great schools of thought; the search for simple pleasures in the every day, of humanism, facing off against spiritualism, and its seeming war against the increasingly mechanised modernity, across a dining table; a dramatic work carried by just two actors. It is at once one of the simplest and most important films of the 1980s

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

My Dinner With André is available via AppleTV and on DVD from Optimum Home Entertainment

Next week, and indeed next week, we're on holiday, but will return in September to discuss films adapted from television series in As Seen on TV Season