Directed by Louis Malle
Released in 1981
Written by Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory
Cinematography by Jeri Sopanen
Language: English
Sometimes things get called "novelistic", snobbishly, as a marker of artistic merit or canonicity. My Dinner with Andre is novelistic in a much more literal sense. Written by playwrights Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, who play themselves, My Dinner with Andre is almost entirely a long conversation. Rather than cutting away from the restaurant the men are dining at, the film keeps the viewers at the level of the word. We can only listen, or, if we so choose, imagine what the lives of these men outside of this moment might look like. At its core, their conversation is about reality and abstraction itself: can we have immediate relation to other people? I tend to come down on this question in the negative, but this film filled me with a juvenile sort of hope to be proven wrong. (April 18, 2026)