My Dinner with Andre is a splend, incredible, quite amazing film. I had this film for quite some time now, made in 1981, for some bizzare reason I assumed it had Elliot Gould in it. In any case it has immediately become one of my favourite films. It is however a difficult film to watch.

It hurts me deeply to think that people have found substance in such mechanical, brain washing tripe as The Matrix trilogy – for all the “philosophical” adoration the hardcore have fans “Hey The Matrix rocks, it provides real questions about who we are, what is real and unreal”. My Dinner for Andre provides more philosophical questions in its opening 15 minutes the Matrix Trilogy in its absolute entirety, theories and everything else that has spun off from this nonesensical rubbish.

This film is the sort of film that would probably have an audience of about 5 people in a cinema. Those 5 would the ones that would not be going to watch the final part of The Matrix, but would instead pick something that takes you away from all the fantasy and makes you genuinely consider and question the reality that we live in.

The movie begins and ends with narration, much like a book, and much of the script is read as a script, as though we as the viewer are reading a book. The story revolves around two people, a playwright (Wally) and a Theatre Director (Andre). Upon watching an Ingmar Bergman movie, Andre is found weeping by a friend. Andre was moved to tears by a line in the the movie, “I could always live in my art, but not in my life.” This is how Wally is, by the mutual friend, told of Andre’s return – after disappearing from the Theatre scene, this was the first he had heard of Andre. A colleague, a friend, someone who helped Wally put his first play on stage.

The movie takes on some incredibly deep, and intriguing propositions – philosophical, social and psychological questions

Wally is asked by Andre to meet him for dinner – the obvious purpose of this dinner is to meet after all these years, and to catch up. Wally is not to keen on the meeting. Once he was “living like an aristrocat” spending money faster than it was coming in. Now he was broke, penniless, just barely surviving the harsh existence of the city of New York – his girlfriend working several nights as a Waitress just to earn enough money to keep them going.

The movie was scripted by Wallace Shawn (Wally) and Andre Gregory themselves, the characters used are themselves and a reflection of their script writing, which makes it all that more convincing as they use their own names. It’s conceivable that the script was written as both a critical and satirical look at life, and the way we behave: we are the audience, they are the actors, the movie is the stage, and we are watching a play just as we take part in one everyday of our lives.

We watch as the energy of conversation flows between Andre and Wally, for most of which the talking is done by Andre, with Wally injecting moments of his madness, and his opinion – agreeing, disagreeing, trying to understand what Andre is saying and what is meant by what he says.

The initial meeting is greeted with Wally looking at Andre and saying “You look great”, Andre’s response, “I feel terrible” or something to that effect. In any case, this is, if you like the synopsis for the entire movie. Not only does Andre discuss the difficulty with which he has lived over the past few years, but also how it has changed him as a person, and how it has brought him full circle in his life to the moment where he is now and what he is feeling. As a Director of plays, to paraphrase Bergman’s dialogue “He lived in his art, but not in his life”. He did not feel or think, except when Directing. But now, he had gone through so much pain, so much agony and a number of extreme experiences that now he could feel again.

My Dinner with Andre, at a restaurant table and runs for nearly two hours. It’s filmed in real time, though it was extensively rehearsed prior to filming, which allows the movie to flow well, the dialogue running from their mouths as though they were thinking about what they were saying, or as I said earlier, it convinces you that this is a setting of two people who are saying what they are thinking. The two go through a starter, a dinner, and finish with an espresso – committing to that reality that is this film, this moment, this setting.

The conversation starts off with Andre discussing what he had done over the years – why he left the Theatre and why he decided to go travelling. He went through many experiences, trying to find answers and meaning to his life – he was in a state of perpetual loss, leaving his family behind. As Wally narrates “He never wants to leave his family”, which meant something had happened to him to make him leave.

Having experienced both spiritually enlightening as well as darkly frightening moments of life, Wally tries to contemplate during the conversation (with facial expressions rather than spoken dicussion) what Andre had gone through, and why. He questions, as he states he feels like a Private Investigator, why Andre had put himself through what he did, why he wasn’t satisfied with what he already had – why the need to understand more, and not just let things happen.

This film is the sort of film that would probably have an audience of about 5 people in a cinema

As Andre discusses his experiences with Wally, he begins to change – the film for some of the way becomes rather bleak, and dark, and at times quite uncomfortable as Andre turns bitter and morbid about what he was feeling “being buried alive”, the emotional turmoil he considers as he is blindfolded, not knowing whether he was going to live or die – all because he wanted more than what he had.

The movie takes on some incredibly deep, and intriguing propositions – philosophical, social and psychological questions. Andre begins his maniacal rants about life, what he expects, how perceives the world to be a manical process, as Wally argues that there is a purpose to why things are the way they are. Andre counters with his anaolgies and you are suddenly watching a converstion that you as the viewer are being drawn into as someone witnessing this in the restaurant itself.

Let me warn you, this film will kick your teeth in with a lot of serious questions – it’s a two hour philosophy lesson, and if you thought The Matrix was deep, then watching this will probably kill you with the irony, satire and cynisim it poses. This is quite a serious film, with moments of relief, but not many. This film is not for everyone, in fact, it is probably for the few. I can understand how my friends would react to it – they would call it dull, boring, and hoping for a moment of ridiculous fantasy in the form of “a gun sequence”, or “a fight scene”. For me, however, it is a brilliant film.

Verdict: Bleak, disturbing at times but deeply thought provoking – storytelling at its best