Two aesthetes meet for a two-hour dinner in a fancy restaurant and talk. Man, does it sound boring. They talk all the time, especially Andre Gregory, the playwright and director. There is an absolute minimum of narration by the other diner, Wallace Shawn. The colloquy is relentless. There are no light moments, no obvious jokes, no badinage. The camera never strays from the faces of the two actors. There are no inserted shot of the meals they are served so we don't even know what they're eating -- and this is directed by Louis Malle, a Frog himself. The film just drones on, cutting from one face to the other. The momentary appearance of a waiter brings a breath of air.
It goes on for almost two hours, yet I found that every time I checked the clock, more time had passed than I'd expected. That's ordinarily the sign of an enjoyable experience. I remember working in the pattern department of Lubell's shirt factory and thinking the clock must have stopped completely. In this case I was unable to lose interest.
I'm not sure why it was hard to ignore the conversation. I'm a behavioral scientist so when someone says something like "we all live in our separate fantasies in order to avoid dealing with reality," I have no idea what it means. Mene mene tekel? I mean it. I'm sitting there while Andre is expounding on how having an electric blanket cuts us off from reality. We no longer are in contact with "cold." We lose our connection to the rest of the natural world, and the rest of humanity too, who may be cold and without electric blankets and who may have to heap their old clothes on top of the ordinary blankets they DO have and -- well, you get the picture. And I'm sitting there thinking, culture is a cocoon that tries to buffer the impact of natural events, of course. We don't even see our corpses until they're prettified. That's precisely what culture DOES. And here Andre is, carrying on like some pop psychologist about "transparency" and "fantasy" and "authenticity." But I could not tear myself away.
Wallace Shawn is an unprepossessing, balding little man who seems content with waking up to an unspoiled cup of coffee. Andre, on the other hand, is a different sort of animal. When Wally asks Andre what he's been doing lately, Andre launches into a full half-hour monologue about dancing naked in a Polish forest with forty Jews who play harps and finally baptize him before burying him alive. It's not a particularly erudite conversation -- there are a few reference to St. Exupery and Jackson Pollack -- but it's weird as hell. Andre seems to think like a combination of Andy Warhol, Timothy Leary, and Jack Kerouac, although he has an actor's impressive face and a deep, incisive voice that's at once soothing and authoritative. Think William Daniels. That voice, with its rolling and expressive contours, even makes it possible for us to believe that when Andre hallucinates a monster at a Christmas Eve mass -- half man, half bull, with poppies growing out of its toes -- he's able to interpret it as a helpful sign.
I still can't quite understand the movie. What was all that intense talk meant to be about. And I can't understand my response to it. Why couldn't I just shut it off and go back to reading my comic book? I've given it extra points for being absolutely, deliberately, suicidally non-commercial. The writers, Shawn and Gregory, and the director, Malle, have given the audience nothing to hang on to but the most wispy of surreal notions and the compelling faces of two decidedly odd people. Your brain may be racing a mile a minute but your adrenal glands will go into Standby.
It goes on for almost two hours, yet I found that every time I checked the clock, more time had passed than I'd expected. That's ordinarily the sign of an enjoyable experience. I remember working in the pattern department of Lubell's shirt factory and thinking the clock must have stopped completely. In this case I was unable to lose interest.
I'm not sure why it was hard to ignore the conversation. I'm a behavioral scientist so when someone says something like "we all live in our separate fantasies in order to avoid dealing with reality," I have no idea what it means. Mene mene tekel? I mean it. I'm sitting there while Andre is expounding on how having an electric blanket cuts us off from reality. We no longer are in contact with "cold." We lose our connection to the rest of the natural world, and the rest of humanity too, who may be cold and without electric blankets and who may have to heap their old clothes on top of the ordinary blankets they DO have and -- well, you get the picture. And I'm sitting there thinking, culture is a cocoon that tries to buffer the impact of natural events, of course. We don't even see our corpses until they're prettified. That's precisely what culture DOES. And here Andre is, carrying on like some pop psychologist about "transparency" and "fantasy" and "authenticity." But I could not tear myself away.
Wallace Shawn is an unprepossessing, balding little man who seems content with waking up to an unspoiled cup of coffee. Andre, on the other hand, is a different sort of animal. When Wally asks Andre what he's been doing lately, Andre launches into a full half-hour monologue about dancing naked in a Polish forest with forty Jews who play harps and finally baptize him before burying him alive. It's not a particularly erudite conversation -- there are a few reference to St. Exupery and Jackson Pollack -- but it's weird as hell. Andre seems to think like a combination of Andy Warhol, Timothy Leary, and Jack Kerouac, although he has an actor's impressive face and a deep, incisive voice that's at once soothing and authoritative. Think William Daniels. That voice, with its rolling and expressive contours, even makes it possible for us to believe that when Andre hallucinates a monster at a Christmas Eve mass -- half man, half bull, with poppies growing out of its toes -- he's able to interpret it as a helpful sign.
I still can't quite understand the movie. What was all that intense talk meant to be about. And I can't understand my response to it. Why couldn't I just shut it off and go back to reading my comic book? I've given it extra points for being absolutely, deliberately, suicidally non-commercial. The writers, Shawn and Gregory, and the director, Malle, have given the audience nothing to hang on to but the most wispy of surreal notions and the compelling faces of two decidedly odd people. Your brain may be racing a mile a minute but your adrenal glands will go into Standby.