My Dinner with André (1981)
Country: US
Technical: col 110m
Director: Louis Malle
Cast: Wallace Shawn, Andre Gregory
Synopsis:
Playwright and sometime actor, Wallace Shawn, is invited out to dinner with former associate, director Andre Gregory, who has spent a traumatic few years engaged in various forms of new-age activity, from free improvisation in a Polish forest to spending time with a Japanese Buddhist monk in the Sahara desert, inspired by Saint-Exupéry.
Review:
A curious negation of cinema, this real-time filmed conversation in which every line is scripted. Ultimately the pair take up opposing lines, with on the one hand Shawn content with his imperfect existence and few creature comforts, and on the other Gregory, forever in search of the authentic experience, the life truly lived. I wish I could say they made riveting company and their conversation were full of small epiphanies, but for the most part the film is a thoroughgoing bore, with only its wilful eccentricity guaranteeing it a footnote in film history.
Country: US
Technical: col 110m
Director: Louis Malle
Cast: Wallace Shawn, Andre Gregory
Synopsis:
Playwright and sometime actor, Wallace Shawn, is invited out to dinner with former associate, director Andre Gregory, who has spent a traumatic few years engaged in various forms of new-age activity, from free improvisation in a Polish forest to spending time with a Japanese Buddhist monk in the Sahara desert, inspired by Saint-Exupéry.
Review:
A curious negation of cinema, this real-time filmed conversation in which every line is scripted. Ultimately the pair take up opposing lines, with on the one hand Shawn content with his imperfect existence and few creature comforts, and on the other Gregory, forever in search of the authentic experience, the life truly lived. I wish I could say they made riveting company and their conversation were full of small epiphanies, but for the most part the film is a thoroughgoing bore, with only its wilful eccentricity guaranteeing it a footnote in film history.
Country: US
Technical: col 110m
Director: Louis Malle
Cast: Wallace Shawn, Andre Gregory
Synopsis:
Playwright and sometime actor, Wallace Shawn, is invited out to dinner with former associate, director Andre Gregory, who has spent a traumatic few years engaged in various forms of new-age activity, from free improvisation in a Polish forest to spending time with a Japanese Buddhist monk in the Sahara desert, inspired by Saint-Exupéry.
Review:
A curious negation of cinema, this real-time filmed conversation in which every line is scripted. Ultimately the pair take up opposing lines, with on the one hand Shawn content with his imperfect existence and few creature comforts, and on the other Gregory, forever in search of the authentic experience, the life truly lived. I wish I could say they made riveting company and their conversation were full of small epiphanies, but for the most part the film is a thoroughgoing bore, with only its wilful eccentricity guaranteeing it a footnote in film history.