Sun, Jan 21 at 7:00pm: Introduction from Scott Juengel, associate professor of English at Vanderbilt University | BUY TICKETS
Part of Sunday Supper
In Louis Malle’s captivating and philosophical film, 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 ANDRE remains a unique work in cinema history.
“Someone asked me the other day if I could name a movie that was entirely devoid of clichés. I thought for a moment, and then answered, MY DINNER WITH ANDRE. Now I have seen the movie again…and I am impressed once more by how wonderfully odd this movie is, how there is nothing else like it. It should be unwatchable, and yet those who love it return time and again, enchanted.” —Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (Jun 13, 1999) “Illustrates how much human interest, entertainment value and even philosophical inquiry can be derived from a situation as static as a dinner conversation. It should also prove a great incentive for dining out and shooting the bull in general.” —Gary Arnold, Washington Post (Jan 19, 1982)
