My Dinner with Andre (1981)

I can't really explain it, but I had really high expectations about Louis Malle's My Dinner with Andre. It's not really that I'm a great fan of Malle (I have seen only two or three movies of his) but I've read somewhere that My Dinner with Andre is a masterpiece in the genre of films where conversations drive the film forward. Well, even though this is by no means a bad films, it's not a particularly good one either, except for a couple of scenes. The film reminded me about another film in which existential problems are discussed in a very obvious, even blunt way - Richard Linklater's Waking Life. The problem with both films is that their attempt to excavate the mind through conversation never succeeds in actually putting into display any of the tension that real conversations contain. I might have been more forgiving, had the writing of the script been more developed or whether there hadn't been such moments of almost embarrassingly affront clashes of Two Life Principles. And what is more, intellectual-sounding discussions about the meaning of art.

Almost the entire movie is set within an upscale N.Y. restaurant. Two friends are talking about the big questions of life. One is a experimental theater director and the other is an actor. The two men are very different. For the first half of the film, the director muses about art, spontaneity, mysticism and what not. He has been traveling and tells his friend one story after another about what he has experienced. Obviously, he is self-indulgent (I am not sure whether this is the film's perspective).  The other guy hums and nods and looks at his friends with a weary smile. It turns out he has a more practical point of view. He wants to enjoy ordinary life, the comfort of his partner and an electric blanket. For the director, this is not what life is about. Life is about Presence. Well, you know, those peculiar moments.

What I liked about the movie was its simplicity and quietness. It starts on a street outside the restaurant and it ends with a few quick frames of a taxi. In the restaurant, the camera looms over the two friends, sometimes filming them so that one of them is seen through a mirror (the best scenes involve a strange waiter who throws condescending glances at the two patrons). The film tries to create the sense of real time - that everything takes place in one unbroken temporal chunk. This works pretty well, even though the whole thing is unnecessarily underlined at the very end (when the director wants us to feel that we, like the two characters, have forgotten all about time). Ebert, whose reviews I always enjoy reading, wrote that My Dinner with André is devoid of clichés. When it comes to style, I would agree with him, at least partially. But I felt that the role of conversation was not that original after all and constantly felt that the result of what might have been a long and winding writing or improvisation process was cramped, rather than the spontaneous flow of back-and-forth that conversation usually is (and I get the sense that the team wants to catch hold of that kind of flow) - that Malle and his actors tried so hard to get to the core of things that the existential relevance was lost on the way, at least in many segments of the film. One example that made me sigh was the Wally, the actor who cherishes the small joys of ordinary life is also presented as a man who elevates science - in contrast with his friend the director who throws himself into life's deep crevices without concern for how he will be brought back. Plain reason vs. Transcendence. My reaction: yawn. But then again, the intentionally rambling aspect of the conversation might be taken in another way than as intellectually unsatisfying: two friends who are too much in love with talk and who get lost in each other's stories or their own goofy existentialism. (My question: who is it that annoys me, the film or the characters?)

I want to make this clear: the major problem I had was not that My Dinner with Andre was a slice of life film that turned out too stagey. Stagey can be good (I think about the version of Uncle Vanya I watched a while ago and how much I enjoyed its fine treatment of theater-as-film-as-theater). Yes it had the mood but it was so full of itself! (For a comparison: another movie with a great mood (a sort of tenderness) and which had some flaws in that direction but worked much, much better: Smoke)

As a matter of fact, I'm a bit mad at myself for not liking this film more. I will watch it again sometimes, and maybe I will realize I my initial judgment was too harsh?