#jean lenauer

[haveyouseenthismovie-poll]

Have you seen My Dinner with Andre (1981)?

Yes

No

Haven’t even heard of this movie

Voting ended onFeb 19

[80smovies]

My Dinner with Andre

[80smovies]

My Dinner with Andre

[80smovies]

My Dinner with Andre

[ofimaginarybeings]

My Dinner With Andre (Louis Malle, 1981)

Jean Lenauer, Wallace Shawn, and Andre Gregory in My Dinner With Andre

Cast: Andre Gregory, Wallace Shawn, Jean Lenauer, Roy Butler. Screenplay: Wallace Shawn, Andre Gregory. Cinematography: Jeri Sopanen. Production design: David Mitchell. Film editing: Suzanne Baron. Music: Allen Shawn.

My Dinner With Andre, a film that has no story of its own, is an engaging tribute to the power of storytelling. Watching two rather ordinary-looking men having dinner in a nicely appointed but not particularly unusual restaurant, we have to supply our own visuals. That is, we supplement what’s on screen with our imagined visualizations of the stories Andre Gregory tells Wallace Shawn about his travels. Gregory is such an artful raconteur that our task is easy, and we conjure up our own versions of his experiences in a Polish forest, the Sahara desert, the Findhorn community in Scotland, and an especially weird Halloween on Long Island. But Shawn is not a sponge: He’s us, a bit skeptical, willing to affirm “Enlightenment values” and ordinary life against Gregory’s spiritual enthusiasms and dodgy adventures. Meanwhile, we’re also watching the men eat – or perhaps not eat, for I grew rather impatient with their ignoring the meal they have ordered. And we’re watching the ambience, the comings and goings of the restaurant, the waiter and bartender and the servers in the background – and sometimes the foreground, for director Louis Malle has provided flickers of action as people pass between the camera and the Shawn-Gregory table. The designers have also cleverly positioned a mirror over the table, so that we get glimpses of people other than our interlocutors. Malle uses this mirror smartly toward the end of the film when we see the waiter standing still in the mirror and realize, before Shawn and Gregory do, that the staff is waiting to close up, delayed only by their conversation. That so much can be made out of so little is one of the surprises and delights of My Dinner With Andre. For some people, I know, it’s like a film about watching paint dry, but I find it a small triumph of unconventional filmmaking.

[80smovies]

My Dinner with Andre

[80smovies]

My Dinner with Andre

[bojanarosic]

My Dinner with Andre 1/14 (by SapphireThursday)

from: http://www.youtube.com/user/SapphireThursday?feature=watch