“My Dinner with Andre” film review

And Commentary of a Cult Classic

A Prophesy of the Coming Dark Ages in 1981

I saw “My Dinner with Andre” in 1981 about 6 months after its release as part of a double-feature in an Art House in New Haven, Connecticut. It was revolutionary at the time, both for its simple format and its profound subject.

In hindsight, it’s a prophetic piece of cinema about the awakening of a theater director who plays himself in the film. The basic story is two old friends of the theater meet and share a conversation over dinner about an awakening — what it means to be present, an awareness of a coming dark age and how most people are dead inside as part of the developing “world totalitarian state based on money”. And we’re entering a “dark and lawless period” where memory and history are being erased — literally we, as a human species, have forgotten about what it means to be human.

The Filming

Louis Malle, the director, describes the film as a “documentary about fiction” that was shot in two days via improvisations from the script. Apparently, Shawn and Gregory played opposite roles in some of the improvs.

The style of Gregory’s character — playing himself is what you might expect of an insular New York City intellectual elite grappling with these existential questions. He can engage in these activities because he has a cushion of funds that luxury allows. Despite the elitist drawback, Andre Gregory playing Andre Gregory allows himself to become vulnerable while risking being labeled as insane to display the alienation of human experience in a changing time.

A Larger Context

It’s likely that Shawn and Gregory wrote the script a year before the film was shot. But Wallace Shawn wrote the final script, which was 3 hours long. It was honed again and again by Louis Malle. It is based on Andre’s experiences as he calls it “as a failure”.

Synchronistically, Ronald Reagan was running for President and took office during and at the time the film was released. It was under Reagan’s reigns of deregulation frenzies that greed became something to aspire to and the common good was left in the gutter. And the predictions of the film had the cement of this conservative President that would plant the seeds of the widest gap between rich and poor. Reagan’s actions set-up the demise of humans economically and environmentally in face of the looming mass extinction event already in progress.

The Dark Age that Andre speaks about in the film sets-up the lawless period, which in-turn sets up the demise of humans in a civilized social order. And we can thank the totalitarian state of money as our demise of the majority of human life on Earth.

If you don’t believe it, watch the film in its entirety: