A Brilliant Conflict

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

Before watching My Dinner with Andre I watched Autumn Sonata. The only thing I liked about My Dinner with Andre was that it mentioned Autumn Sonata, how lovely. But that's about it. The monologues in Autumn Sonata are beautiful and interesting, the monologues in My Dinner... are dull and boring. Seriously, I've heard far better monologues from drunk or high collegestudents sitting in their dormroom talking nonsense about life. The ideas exchanged in My Dinner are not even pseudo-intellectualistic. There's absolutely nothing there. I expected a lot because I love movies that are all about the monologues and dialogues (Coffee and Cigarettes, Before-trilogy, Locke, Eric Rohmer, Ingmar Bergman...whatever) but I'm so dissapointed with this one. I see a lot of positive reviews, how that is possible, I don't understand. People calling this thought-provoking and intellectual probably haven't watched a lot of or the right cinema or read some decent books.

This movie is superbly written and has some of the best dialogue I've ever experienced on film. The sudden editing and lighting changes were rather obtrusive at times, but overall, it's a bloody good film!!!

Cinema as an art form is purely a matter of personal choice as reasons to love or hate a film depend on the viewer's intellectual framework and artistic sensibilities. This is one reason why a film with two people talking about things which make sense to human beings might please certain viewers but might also put foolish viewers to sleep. However, a film about two people talking makes a lot of sense as long as their conversations happen to be interesting. This is something which the great French director Louis Malle has achieved when he cast actors André Gregory and Wallace Shawn in "My dinner with André", a film where human ears do more work than eyes for normal films. A viewer has to pay absolute attention to two people's conversations in order to ascertain why films with neither stories nor plots can be made. Regarding this film, fans of Hollywood style films might complain that it suffers from lack of action. However, it is not true as Louis Malle wrote his film's script in such an erudite manner that strengths and weaknesses of characters are revealed in the end. How people talk with emotions itself is a testimony to their willingness to reveal more about themselves. This is a reason why "My dinner with André" makes as much sense as films sans plots directed by maverick Belgian director Chantal Akerman.

Philosophy, existentialism, transcendentalism all collide over quail dinner. Some may see this movie as a time-suck, when in fact it's not, it's compelling and lets the viewer feel as if he's dining at the next table, listening in on something beyond the normal dinner conversation. There's no question as to how anybody else on the screen or talked about feels, it's simply two men having conversation, and that conversation ends up being exceptionally colorful and deep and full of crap at times, but never boring.For the first quarter, it feels as if Andre's existentialist dilemmas are so farcical and ridiculous that they must be pretense, yet once the infinitely-traveled (both the world and the being) Andre calls his own behavior out as abhorrent, things flip on their ear and get your attention.Wally and Andre agree and disagree on the nature of (then-modern) life within the same breaths, rarely exposing anything other than a friendly listening ear, hardly daring to show conflict as that would be outrageous in a conversation such as this between these two people.Some of what Andre says about the fundamentals of society have been proved prescient when a trip on the bus has the majority of riders interacting only with their phones, never truly communicating or living with those people around them. In that way, it's impossible 33 years later not to view truths in the wild stories being told by a man who may not be as nuts as he seems at times, but definitely has let his enlightenment cloud his ability to actually live his life. Yet time after time, we are faced with the very real possibility that Andre's crisis comes from losing his mother, an event which comes up over and over in tales - or maybe he's right on track, and using that event only as a stinging example of the blind men describing the elephant.Wally meanwhile plays the polite ear for a time, then a sounding board, finally even making counterpoints to a much more "here and now" life, but he never fully gives himself over to fighting his friend's ideas, and he rarely shows a hint that he might be bored or glazing over. The fact that Wally, our "protagonist" - if that's what you can call his role - refuses to disengage with Andre the way so many of their friends have shows a kindness and an ability to truly take in the ideas behind a man seemingly broken and on the fringes of society.I remember overhearing talk like this when I was a kid, some of those conversations were the best ideas and some were the absolute worst dreck. How they were used ended up being where their true value mattered, and this film touches on that, but doesn't force it down the viewer's throat. By the end of the few hours, the viewer is a little exhausted, the voice-over narration bookends feel clumsy, but - despite a lack of answers or anything of that nature - something happened and because of that, the viewer felt. That's where entertainment and art must collide to be successful. Part of me would love to find out how Andre's wife and children, how Wally's girlfriend, how their theater community friends, even how the waitstaff dealt with the repercussions of that conversation, there are a lifetime of ideas that have come and gone since this film was made, a near-total abandonment of the type of "self-examination at all costs" behavior Andre lives by in the film, so in that way the film leaves us with the possibility of going anywhere we want, viewing sequels in our own minds. That's a strong tale told then, a movie that's just two New Yorkers having dinner being so much more without pushing at all.Some audiences, perhaps most, won't be able to take this film in. It is longwinded and "nothing happens", it doesn't even entirely look good at times, but where it succeeds is in engaging far beyond the audience's expectations without anything other than some dinner, conversations, and coffee.