Review: My Dinner With André

2½/10 Stars. “My Dinner with André” - Luis Malle.

Whether you will enjoy this film or not depends on two things, 1) your patience with extended nonaction and 2) your degree of agreement with André’s absurd new-age ramblings. I have the former, not the latter.

This film strips away all complications and leaves us with literally nothing but a dinner conversation between two friends who fell out of touch for a year. This is not a film for the play-station generation, or those otherwise unduly impatient. I say conversation, monologue is more like it; except at the very beginning and end Wally says little other than “yes”, “go on” and such.

Therein lies the crux of the problem: André himself. Any rational person will find many parts of what is said to be tiresomely trite. The appearance of profoundness is here, but not profoundness itself.

Some of what André says, when he’s not wobbling at the profound, is actually interesting, even amusing. But the moment the script veers into deeper territory all logic becomes unhinged and our interest is lost.

That I enjoyed the film at all has more to do with the fact that André reminds me very much of a (completely mad) friend of mine. Of course this friend and I have indeed had conversations remarkably similar to this one, and at times even more nonsensical. But while I enjoy these conversations, such a thing is not very interesting happening to someone else. Even if it were, I can’t live vicariously here because I can’t identify with Wally at all.

Do not be put off solely by the idea that nothing at all happens in this film. The film does not suffer from the removal of distraction in the slightest. The real problem is that the script mainly is bosh. You should see it, though, as it was an important and highly influential film. Actors and those working in theatre and cinema will be especially interested.

It is sad, in a way, that this film is consigned to the category of films you should see because you must—because it’s important, because it’s educating. Because, because. Like Kubrick’s “2001” and Dzigo Vertov’s “Man with a Movie Camera” (two other films from that category) it is deadly dull, not because little happens, but because little worth saying is said.

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