Thursday, November 4, 1982
Daily Nebraskan
Page 11
Two men eating dinner make life seem easier
' - i i; if Si n
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By David Thompson
"When I was young ... all I thought about was art
and music," Wally Shawn says, walking through New
York City. "Now I'm 36, and all I think about is money."
He describes this move from enthusiastic idealism to
pragmatic materialism while he makes his way along
dingy streets to a fancy restaurant where he is meeting his
friend for dinner. The dinner, along with these opposing
attitudes, forms the heart of "My Dinner With Andre,"
a film Louis Malle that opens at Sheldon tonight.
At the restaurant Wally meets a friend whom he hasn't
seen for several years. Andre has been on a spiritual
quest to Poland, Scotland, India and the Sahara Desert,
and he's meeting with Wally to fill him in on what's been
going on. The conversation between the two men com
prises most of the film, and their words and faces are all
we have to go on.
That's an interesting point on which to build a film.
There is no real plot. The structure of the film has been
stripped of events. We have merely a situation and the
sounds of words bouncing off the walls of that situation.
Like a philosophic dialogue, it is constructed "to bring
up bits of reality and show them to people,"
Sound pretty arid? Well, it's not, because unlike a
philosophic dialogue perched on methodical constructs,
this conversation is a skin of ideas laid across the skeleton
of Andre's wild experiences. He talks to trees, eats sand,
dances around fires stark naked and throw magazines onto
tables waiting for them to flip open and reveal the secret
of his existence.
Before the chat gets under way, Wally says, "I was
feeling nervous. I wasn't sure I could sit through an entire
dinner with him." At the start, we aren't sure either.
But once Malle's camera scrutinizes Andre's face and we
see the wild-eyed sincerity written all over it, we accept
what he says.
This also means accepting the tone of condescension
in his voice, the way he barely lets Wally get a word in
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edgewise and the fact that he is an upper-class individual
with enough cockiness to think he can run around the
world "flashing on death camps" and expect us to listen
to him.
We forgive him to some extent for being pretentious,
because he is continually calling those pretensions into
question. "Who did I think I was?" he asks. "The Shah of
Iran?" He realized the conceit involved with thinking that,
because he's an artist, "the rules of ordinary life didn't
apply." Or perhaps Andre Gregory and Wally Shawn,
who wrote the script about themselves, threw in
statements like that just to make themselves look good.
We don't, know, and there's really little point in trying to
find out.
Shawn, a playwright, and Gregory, a theater director,
based the script on tapes of their conversations. The story
is true, and Gregory claims that everything he describes
in the film, like learning to hold his hand in a fire without
burning it, actually happened.
Whether they happened or not doesn't really matter
either, because what they are attempting to do is
construct a mythology, "a new language, the language of
the heart." They believe that people fail to appreciate
life because they are numbed by modern times, scien
tific "truth" and electric blankets. They believe that a
new basis needs to be found from which to make spiritual
leaps and bounds.
They find this basis in the stories of their lives, whether
Gregory's harebrained excursions or Shawn's thrill at
finding that "there's just as much reality to be perceived
in a cigar store as there is on Mt. Everest." They weave
these stories with the stories of others whose names are
tossed all over the place. Whether it be Bertolt Brecht,
George Orwell, a Swedish physicist or these two men
eating dinner together, everywhere about us there are
stories, signs whose bits and pieces we can put together to
help make life a little easier.
Soundlike a big job? Well, these guys aren't the first to
try to tackle finding new light, but Jesus wasn't the first
either. Malle's subdued direction enunciates the point by
continually poking the material world into the flighty
arguments.
. At one point, Wally says, "The wonderful thing about
scientific theories is that they're based on experiments."
As he says this the waiter plops coffee cups on the table,
merging objects with ideas. Wally represents one and
Andre the other, and Malle shows the interplay between
the two, moving his camera back and forth from the
gleam in Andre's eyes to Wally's skeptical chin jutting
from its resting place in his hand.
The argument between the two will never cease and,
also, will never cease to be intriguing. What it all comes
down to is who you are, and how sincere you are at living
that identity, at living with other people, at talking over
dinner. "Have a complete relationship with another
person," Andre says, "and you're sailing off into
uncharted seas."
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Photos courtesy of Sheldon Film Theater
If you can keep yourself from being too conscious of
the boat, the film is a fascinating voyage. When Wally
goes home that evening, he looks around him and sees
that "every single building was connected to some
memory in my mind." This frames the voyage, showing
that Wally changed a little bit along the way.
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Regular Admission H2$tO UNL Students $715
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