Appetite For Discussion

How strange it feels to own My Dinner With Andre on a pristine DVD. Louis Malle’s 1981 film is the latest release from the prestigious Criterion label, and it has Criterion’s usual sumptuous packaging and tastefully chosen extras, including new interviews with stars Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory by filmmaker Noah Baumbach.

It’s quite an upgrade from the version of My Dinner With Andre I owned when I was a precocious 14-year-old film buff who never missed an episode of Sneak Previews, the show Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert used to host on PBS. I’d even watch a lot of those episodes twice, and it didn’t matter to me if the films they were discussing would never play Hamilton, Ontario, where I lived, or if they were rated R, which meant I’d never be allowed into the theatre to watch them.

My Dinner With Andre was one of the movies they championed most enthusiastically back then, and so when it was broadcast on PBS a couple of years later, I didn’t just watch it — I sat there in front of the TV set with my little audio tape recorder, holding the microphone up to the speaker, and flipping over the cassette every half hour, trying to miss as little of the dialogue as possible. Ah, the days before VCRs! Since the film was pretty much all dialogue, it didn’t lose much in the translation to my audio-only cassettes, and I must have listened to that recording dozens upon dozens of times. I’d put it on as I went to sleep, or listen to it in my room on rainy Sunday afternoons — as well as plenty of sunny ones. And then I moved away from home and somehow those cassettes were either misplaced or thrown out, I don’t really remember which.

Now My Dinner With Andre has come back into my life, in much the same way that Andre Gregory comes back into Wallace Shawn’s life at the start of the film — an old friend full of wild stories, come to shake me out of my workaday complacency. In the film, Shawn and Gregory play lightly fictionalized versions of themselves: Shawn is a playwright, Gregory a globetrotting theatre director. They’re meeting for dinner in a fancy restaurant, and Shawn’s discomfort in these expensive surroundings is quite lovable — he orders quail for his main course and when the dish arrives, he exclaims, a little disappointedly, “Oh... I didn’t know they were so small.”

The two men haven’t seen each other for years, and the first section of the film consists of Gregory’s accounts of all the crazy experiences he’s been having — teaching theatre workshops in a Polish forest, going on a retreat to the Sahara with a Tibetan monk, getting buried alive as part of a macabre Halloween ceremony — while Shawn listens politely, if a little dubiously. The film then subtly turns into a friendly debate about the proper way to live one’s life, with Gregory arguing for the importance of magic and transcendental, quasi-mystical experiences in exotic lands, and Shawn the pragmatist extolling the simple pleasures in life — a quiet night home with his girlfriend, a cup of cold coffee in the morning, putting on his little plays, and reading Charlton Heston’s autobiography. No one wins the debate, but they do both agree that a life lived mechanically, a life without joy and wonder, is no life at all.

When I listened to My Dinner With Andre all those years ago, Gregory was the one I waned to be when I grew up. I wanted to have crazy experiences out in the forest — I really could see myself eating sand in the Sahara or agreeing to being buried alive, just to be able to say I’d done it. Now, 20 years later, I see that I’ve become more of a Wally — the solace of a cup of coffee and Charlton Heston’s autobiography seems pretty appealing to me these days. (Also, the film takes a much more skeptical view of Gregory’s adventures than I realized when I was younger. I laughed, for instance, at the way Gregory prefaces his tale of being buried alive by casually mentioning that it happened at “Dick Avedon’s place out on Montauk.”)

I imagine I’ll keep on having different reactions to My Dinner With Andre every time I see it, noticing different ironies, being swayed by different arguments, changing my opinion as to just how much genuine wisdom Gregory’s notions contain and how much of them are nothing but bullshit. I could see myself watching it just to savour Jean Lenauer’s enigmatic performance as the elderly waiter who keeps the food coming.

But I can’t see myself ever failing to be refreshed, emotionally and intellectually, by this wonderful, spellbinding film — or moved by the simple, perfect ending, with Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1” playing on the soundtrack as Wallace Shawn peers through the window of his cab, remembering his life, and anxious to get home to his girlfriend and “tell her everything about my dinner with Andre.”