My Dinner with Andre (DVD)

Synopsis

A stream-of-consciousness dialogue between playwright/actor Wallace Shawn and director/actor Andre Gregory, as it unfolds over dinner in a posh NYC restaurant. The two basically play themselves, and Andre does most of the talking. Wallace Shawn functions as a sort of audience-surrogate, grounding Gregory's philosophical speculations with his own occasional wisecracks.

In Louis Malle's captivating and philosophical My Dinner with André, actor and playwright Wallace Shawn sits down with friend and theater director André Gregory at an Upper West Side restaurant, and the two proceed into an alternately whimsical and despairing confessional on love, death, money, and all the superstition in between. Playing variations on their own New York–honed personas, Shawn and Gregory, who also wrote the screenplay, dive in with introspective, intellectual gusto, and Malle captures it all with a delicate, artful detachment. A fascinating freeze-frame of cosmopolitan culture, My Dinner with André remains a unique work in cinema history.