My Dinner with Andre (Louis Malle, 1981)

My Dinner with Andre is famous for being a film just about two guys sitting and talking in a restaurant. And this is true, for about 100 minutes it’s just conversation at the table, nothing else. It’s an interesting concept, and of course Louis Malle is an excellent director, but does it work? Does the film manage to create a meaning and story even though it has such limited range? Or is it just a pretentious experiment that doesn’t really hold any value in cinema?

The set up is simple enough; a failing playwright is invited to dinner by his estranged friend Andre, who used to be a very successful theatre director. The two primary cast members are Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, both playing fictionalized versions of themselves. At first it’s a though movie to take, the camera is fixed on Andre as he talks about his recent exploits. However, after 20 or 30 minutes it really starts to drag you in, almost in a hypnotic way. In the beginning I was watching the timer, but at the end it felt as if it was over in no time. The audience becomes very much a part of the conversation; we share the perspective of Wallace, who does most of the listening, although towards the end he has a couple of things to say for himself. The film touches upon issues of how society works and the masks we wear. Do we really live our lives in a real way? The film forces the audience to confront these issues, although Andre can sound a bit high and mighty at times. Wallace very much grounds us down, emphasizing the little things in life that have value.

Both cast members do a good job, although there isn’t really that much dramatic material to deal with. The conflict works on a very intellectual level, but there’s definitely some conflict there between the two, although it’s all quite polite. Louis Malle was the director and I can see the challenge in the project that might have drawn him to it. However, he does a fine job, keeping it simple and slick. The atmosphere in the restaurant, although subdued in the background, adds a decent layer to the film and the issues that are being talked about. By the end it feels like time has stopped and is suddenly started again, when the characters realize that the once full restaurant is now empty. The film leaves you with a taste, a pondering. This is where I find the major strength of the film lies. You leave the film feeling richer or perhaps poorer and despairing, depending on your point of view. It’s an intimate conversation about deep human emotions, and we’re allowed to see it all. It’s not just a question of audiences listening, but we also have to participate, giving our own mental notes and discerning what really is behind the character of Andre. It might drag in the beginning, but at the end it works marvelously well.

Whether or not someone likes My Dinner with Andre is purely a matter of taste. There is certainly something to be had here, and many will find it a wonderful movie, but if you decide to turn it off in the first 20 minutes and never pay the film any mind ever again, I would certainly not hold it against you.

Au Revoir les Enfants (Louis Malle, 1987)

Louis Malle made a bunch of films in the 50’s and 60’s that I liked, so this was my first venture into the later stages of his career, and this is probably the film I’ve heard the most about without knowing who Louis Malle was, so I had a certain anticipation to watching this. But I don’t really know what to expect from a Malle film, like when I watched Zazie dans le metro (1960) and was blown away by how different it was to any previous film I had seen by him. In fact, it had more in common with those Warner Brothers cartoons than any of his films. Anyway, so Au Revoir les Enfants is probably his most famous film from what I gather, and it depicts what certain filmmakers really love to depict, the Second World War. However, this time around, the story is quite autobiographical, from Louis Malle’s childhood. It’s about his growing friendship with a Jewish boy who is hidden at his Catholic boarding school, and the ongoing presence and threat of the Germans.

And its good, it actually is. It isn’t as much about the Second World War as about growing up to adulthood and friendship. The film strengthens this by putting these familiar themes into an extreme situation. But most of the stuff that happens is like things we ourselves remember, like kids sneaking off to smoke, increasing interest in the opposite gender, hate-love relationships and so on. But the film depicts its so well, and we see easily that Malle is a really experienced director by now, his subtle touches with the camera are at times fantastic, the setting is well defined and we quickly grow familiar with it. The film does get a bit frustrating at times, as it stigmatises the characters and situations a bit. However, it doesn’t get too bad, and it’s still miles away from that atrocity Schindlre’s List. But it does seem as its impossible for filmmakers to make such films without doing this, the closest to avoid it I feel were The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998) and The Pianist (Roman Polanski, 2002). I really tend to find Second World War films a bit tiresome and trite, but this is one of the better ones, for the obvious reason that the war for the most part only remains in the background. Obviously, at the “heart” of the story is the friendship, but it also works well as a coming of age story, using the war as an excuse for the lead character to grow up.

For me though, the strongest aspect of this film was it dealing with the reasons for cultural barriers. The kids seem to refer to Jews as something merely abstract, simply because they don’t know them upfront, and in this case the film is actually still pretty relevant, as this is still going on. Their not anti-Semitic, but at the same time they don’t disapprove with the Germans treatment of Jews. Most of their comments on Jews seem right out of a textbook, which I would find fairly accurate to how kids without any critical knowledge would know these other religious people. It’s a really great observation, when the Jewish kid first arrives, they treat him like an outsider. Not because he’s Jewish, they don’t know yet, but simply because he’s new and they don’t know him. When they start to discover that he is a Jew, they don’t treat him any differently because he’s by then come into the fold. I find this is a good statement about how our religious backgrounds are just bullocks. Its also nice to see Catholics for once given dignity, and I do think the priests at the school should be honoured for taking in Jewish kids at the risk of their own personal safety, even though they are from different religions, again discussing this idea of religious background, we are still in the same shit. Sure, they are given their bit of ridicule through some slight humour, but it’s never truly mean spirited. Oh and by the way, the film didn’t manage to avoid the Nazi character that seems right out of a Superman cartoon, but it almost seems unavoidable in any Second World War film.

This is a very good film, with some really fantastic moments and genuine emotions. It has some elements that are true splendour, and some that are slightly weaker. It doesn’t come together as well as one would wish, but its individual pros make it more than worthwhile. I don’t really know why this is Malle’s most famous film, maybe because of the approachable themes and setting and being relatively “new”, but still, I preferred Le Feu Follet (Louis Malle, 1963)