This notorious “art” film weaves a spell over all that have seen it — whether they say they liked it or not. It’s notorious in that it dares to be completely unlike anything you have ever seen before. Director Louis Malle (ATLANTIC CITY) makes a film that Roger Ebert calls the only film free of all clichés. I’d have to agree with that statement.
The title is also a description. Two old friends have dinner and that’s about it. A short prologue with Wally (Wallace Shawn, THE PRINCESS BRIDE) walking to the restaurant provides some backstory via voice over.
Wally is a struggling actor/author/playwright who is going to dinner with an old friend he has been avoiding for a year or so. That friend is Andre (Andre Gregory, THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST), a New York theater director, who was pretty big, but then dropped out of the scene for five years to travel the world.
The two men meet at the restaurant and Wally asks Andre what he’s been up to. This starts Andre on a series of stories which have him participating in strange theater-like performances in the forests of Poland to working on farms in England where the farmers talk to the insects and convince them to stay away from the vegetables to bringing a monk from China to live with him and his family for six months. As Andre’s stories get more and more fantastic, we watch Wally’s expressions change from polite nods (where we believe he’s thinking Andre is nuts) to rapture.
The key to the film’s success is that Andre Gregory is a master storyteller. His face is full of life and though we might doubt his complete truthfulness, we don’t mind because at least he isn’t boring. Through the course of the dinner, the characters’ natures are well defined. Andre believes in omens and superstition while Wally is rooted in science and the tasks of his everyday existence. Though he might not convert Wally into a true believer, Andre is able to make Wally understand what he is feeling.
Actually one of the main themes in their conversation is about feelings and how we as a society have made it unacceptable to feel true emotions in public or with other people. In the opening voice over, Wally tells a story of another friend who saw Andre leaning up against a building and crying, because he just saw an Ingmar Bergman film where a character stated “I could always live in my art, but not in my life.” This story is key to our perception of Andre before we meet him as well as key to why Andre dropped out of the theater.
It’s also key to understanding what the film is trying to do. Andre and Wally at one point argue the effectiveness of theater on modern society and whether it can actual move people and make them think. Andre argues that the conventional theater cannot do this anymore and that people must go to Alaska or anywhere out of their day-to-day rote lives to be able to be touched. Wally disagrees. You may too. But think about how audacious it is to make a movie that has two smart men sitting down to dinner for nearly two hours and talking. I guess Wally’s right that you don’t have to go all the way to Alaska to wake people up, not when you can change the movie environment they have become so accustomed to.
Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
Creator of Rick's Flicks Picks
