Food for Thought

FEW DIRECTORS can confound critics as thoroughly as Louis Malle. Pretty Baby gave him the perfect opportunity to produce a beautiful film with a good does of social commentary. But instead he made a smooth inoffensive period piece, a restrained account of pedophilia that cast glances but spared innuendo.

Malle's new film, My Dinner With Andre, seems to turn the same trick, but with a more highbrow audience in mind. For over two hours, two men comment copiously on the human spirit, the state of art and theater, life, death, Nazism, facism, and the '60s. But when dinner's over, and the tables are cleared off, we're left with just another period piece, this one for the 1980s.

Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory play themselves. Wally a New York playwright whose plays no one will bother to produce. Andre a world-renowned dramatist and incurable manic-depressive whose obsession with death seems to be the drug that keeps him plugged into the world. Andre invites his old friend Wally to come and meet him to talk and enjoy dinner at a lavish Manhattan restaurant.

The talk is of the spiritual, and of unconventional approaches to reality, as Andre pulls Wally along on his many journeys to different journeys and alternate states of consciousness. To Poland, where he sat with 40 women speaking a different language from his own. "Technically, it's a different situation." Andre inflects "Imagine it. You ask yourself all the questions Stanislavsky asks; "Who am I? What am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here?"

The conversation turns to "a Jackson Pollack painting, bursting forth," then modulates to Hitler's Nuremberg rallies, and then to William Blake's world and to Auschwitz and Dachau. This is the sort of experience Andre seeks, excitement and fury taken to the highest pitch possible.

"So did you ever go to India?" Wally asks. "I felt all wrong. I felt just like a tourist." And on to Scottish eccentrics and their All Soul's Day celebrations.

WALLY IS UNQUESTIONABLY the inferior of the pair when it comes to appearances. Short and stout, with balding, frizzy hair that reveals a large melon of a forehead, he sits in marked contrast to Andre--tall, angular, and handsome. Like a baby squeezing a bathtub toy, Andre can play on Wally, eliciting a sputtering high-pitched squeal.

Wally is clearly less well-fed than his companion. To him, stomaching Andre's ravings is a fair price for a fine meal, and he's willing to sit back, chow down, and nod.

But Andre's sheer determination to spread his gospel of the surreal eggs Wally on to respond. It's hard to know exactly what sets him off. Perhaps, he perceives in Andre's calm mellifluous tone a lack of confidence that gives him leeway to speak up loudly and clearly. And that's just how Wally responds, with a diatribe of his own, against the unnecessarily highbrow. The world for him is real, with cockroaches, and stale coffee, and if the cockroaches stay out of his coffee, he'll be happy. He huffs and sputters, but he says what he has to say. He tells Andre what he thinks of all his spiritualism: "I know what you're talking about, but, then, I don't know what you're talking about." His world is the world he has to walk through, the subway he has to take, to get to the plush restaurant.

Andre, of course, finds his friend's reaction enchanting. Goading him on--"You have to clear the noise out of the world"--he reaffirms his belief in a higher level of existence.

A car honks its horn at that moment, and as Malle contrives it, it resounds within the restaurant, as if to resolve the evening's dilemma. Wally and Andre cast their parting shots amicably, and with music from the piano, the spell is ended.

THE FILM'S BRIEF EXCURSIONS outside that restaurant show Wally on his way to dinner, and on his way home. In these two scenes, Malle sets My Dinner With Andre against a worldly canvas of commercialism and decay. His opening shot frames a refuse bin piled over with garbage, before widening to the dingy vision late afternoon sunlight casts on a New York City street. The closing credits play in front of a strip of posh boutiques caught by a camera moving along with the nighttime taxicab. Like a painter shadowing still-life with the dim light of a candle, Malle offers these tableaux to mark the disjunction between this reality of day and night, sights and sounds, and the restaurant where Wally goes to find Andre.

My Dinner With Andre might be interpreted as a grand allegory, a dialogue between the self of day to day life and the soul of wistful fantasy. Perhaps it ends too easily, bringing us back to the light and sounds of the real world. The screenplay--serious, reflective, humorous and often challenging--is most effective, playing on the two actors, more than they play their roles. But in the end, savoring My Dinner With Andre, as Wally did his, is the best course available.