FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE Louis Malle - My Dinner With Andre 

No other movie is like Louis Malle's My Dinner With Andre. There is nothing like it! My Dinner With Andre is completely free of filmic formulas and clichés! What is the plot? Exactly as the title announces. The playwright Wallace Shawn is on his way to dinner with a man he has not seen in years. Perhaps he's been avoiding him a bit? The man is a renowned New York theater director named Andre Gregory. For a long time he had been off the screen. Andre remembers talking to a friend in front of a cinema. The conversation between people who only exist in their art, but not in their lives. Then Wally and Andre meet. They talk. Mostly Andre talks while Wally listens. Wally is a domestic type. He likes it homely. He's a little stocky and cross-eyed. He looks like an intellectual. In one of his greatest movies he was described as a little "homunculus". Remember? Wally's father was editor of a famous newspaper. In the old days, according to Wally, when he was young and rich, all he thought about was art and music. Today, at 36, all he cares about is money. Unlike Wally, Andre is big and square. Returned from distant lands with stories he tells with sparkling zeal. Andre lived in Tibet and in the Sahara. He tells of an experience from Poland. How a creature appeared to him in a church and violets grew from its eyes. Wally tries to change the subject. He inquires whether Andre had ever seen the play "Violets Are Blue"? The attempt to describe My Dinner With Andre with: Two men eating and talking - but would be negligent! Louis Malle pays the greatest attention to detail. Obviously this conversation was staged with great care. WHAT is said is less important than the tone, HOW it is said. This is the opposite of real time! Maybe I can imagine it like our bar film that is currently being made. The directors of our bar film record a mass of conversations and try to make a script out of them. Again and again the conversations in My Dinner With Andre sound almost like satire. Were the people really wiped out after their last flourishing during the 60s? Andre glows with enthusiasm about the modern age. Wally seems desperate. What Wally demands from life is simple: a cup of coffee in the morning, his pieces and payment. In the evening he enjoys himself. Wally appreciates comfort. Like when the Times is on your doorstep in the morning. He believes neither in fate nor destiny. The only thing Wally believes in is science. Andre, however, does not question the scientific method - he simply does not find it helpful. The search for transcendence, however, is the future. Meanwhile, an almost ghostly apparition serves them food... One can read a lot about the visible reflections in mirrors or the camera in Louis Malle's film, which is calculated with millimeter precision. But what interests me most of all is the quality as an audience favorite! Twice we screened My Dinner With Andre in our crowded mini-cinema. And for years the DVD has been borrowed magnificently in our video store! The question most asked by the audience Do Wally and Andre actually play themselves? There's a funny remark by Wallace Shawn. At the next My Dinner With Andre they would simply change roles.