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Monday, 29 June 2009
Louis Malle's classic 1981 My Dinner
wtih André, written and performed by director André
Gregory and dramatist Wallace Shawn, makes its appearance in the Criterion
Collection this month. Notorious for its seemingly simple situation (two
men having dinner together) and its wide-ranging conversation, the
film is nevertheless a complex investigation of art, avant-garde theatre,
friendship, parenthood and aging as the two old friends catch up with each
other. "Wally," a moderately successful playwright, seems almost to dread
seeing "André," a theatre director, again after some time during
which André has been travelling the world and engaging in a series of
esoteric investigations, while Wally has been living
hand-to-mouth and trying to make ends meet in New York.
The film is usually described as a debate between the spiritualist
(André) and the materialist (Wally), high-falutin' mysticism and
sheer practical sense, and more often than not Wally's appreciation of the
small creature comforts of life is thought to trump André's more
abstract musings, but the conclusion is far more subtle than that. It's
usually forgotten that it's the spiritualist André who has the
last words of the conversation in a haunting dénouement
that touches on death, fear, isolation, love, and not least on the
friendship we've been privileged to see delineated over the past two hours
(the script was crafted by the performers together over a period of years
during which it was performed live several times):
ANDRÉ: Of course there's a problem, because the closer
you come, I think, to another human being, the more completely mysterious
and unreachable that person becomes. I mean, you know, you have to reach
out and you have to go back and forth with them, and you have to relate,
and yet you're relating to a ghost or something. I don't know, because
we're ghosts, we're phantoms. Who are we? And that's to face – to
confront the fact that you're completely alone, and to accept that you're
alone is to accept death.
WALLY: You mean, because somehow when you are alone, you're
alone with death, I mean, nothing's obstructing your view of it, or
something like that.
ANDRÉ: Right.
Pause.
WALLY: You know, if I understood it correctly, I think
Heidegger said that if you were to experience your own being to the full
you'd be experiencing the decay of that being toward death as a part of
your experience.
ANDRÉ: You know, in the sexual act there's that moment
of complete
forgetting, which is so incredible. Then in the next moment you start to
think about things: work on the play, what you've got to do tomorrow. I
don't know if this is true of you, but I think it must be quite common.
The world comes in quite fast. Now that again may be because we're afraid
to stay in that place of forgetting, because that again is close to death.
Like people who are afraid to go to sleep. In other words: you interrelate
and you don't know what the next moment will bring, and to not know what
the next moment will bring brings you closer to a perception of death!
You see, that's why I think that people have affairs. Well,
I mean, you
know, in the theater, if you get good reviews, you feel for a moment that
you've got your hands on something. You know what I mean? I mean it's a
good feeling. But then that feeling goes quite quickly. And once again you
don't know quite what you should do next. What'll happen? Well, have an
affair and up to a certain point you can really feel that you're on firm
ground. You know, there's a sexual conquest to be made, there are
different questions: does she enjoy the ears being nibbled, how intensely
can you talk about Schopenhauer in some elegant French restaurant.
Whatever nonsense it is. It's all, I think, to give you the semblance that
there's firm earth.
Well, have a real relationship with a person that goes on
for years,
that's completely unpredictable. Then you've cut off all your ties to the
land and you're sailing into the unknown, into uncharted seas. I mean, you
know, people hold on to these images: father, mother, husband, wife, again
for the same reason: because they seem to provide some firm ground. But
there's no wife there. What does that mean, a wife? A husband? A son? A
baby holds your hands and then suddenly there's this huge man lifting you
off the ground, and then he's gone. Where's that son?
A fine new essay by Amy
Taubin on the film was posted last week on the Criterion Web site. If
you haven't
seen the film, or if you haven't seen it in a number of years, it's worth
watching.
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