586 - My Dinner with Andre, United States, 1981. Dir. Louis Malle.
We can't be direct, so we end up saying the weirdest things.
Andre is agreeing with Wally, and is summing up what Wally has just said.
Wally has told a story about a time he played a cat in a play. The catsuit got delivered the night of the play, so he would be wearing it for the first time live before an audience. His fellow actors approached him and made thoughtless comments about his headgear. One suggested he would not be able to hear what the other actors were saying. The other suggested that he might feint on stage from having his inner ear disoriented. Wally felt that their behavior was hostile, an act of aggression, as if they might be sabotaging his performance beforehand. And yet they were people who liked him. Theater friends. So why would they say such things to him just before going on stage?
Andre asks him if he expressed his feelings to them.
Wally says, No, he did not even know how he felt about it until later. Only then did he realize their words had had a hostile effect.
This moment of agreement occurs midway through the dinner. As the two men, old friends from New York theater who have not seen each other in awhile, discuss the problem of human communication in the modern age. Among other thing.
We began the film with Wallace Shawn, played by WALLACE SHAWN, walking to dinner while talking to us in voice-over. We spend about ten minutes going with him. Riding the subway. Passing through neighborhoods where he grew up. And he explains to us that he is apprehensive about having dinner with Andre, as he has been avoiding him for a few years.
Andre was a successful director. But then he started travelling. Leaving his wife and children, whom he loved, for months at a time. Andre's wife is Chiquita. His children are Nicolas and Marina.
Occasionally he would pop up at parties and regale people with stories of his travels. But those stories also caused concern. Not necessarily for their bohemian experimentation--his circle of friends would have tolerated that easily enough, at least the theater portions of it--but because of the unusual, excessive spiritual import he began to ascribe to mundane things. And because he said he talked to trees.
Wallace's acquaintance George Grassfield ran into Andre last night. George was walking his dog. Andre was leaning against an old building sobbing, having just seen Ingmar Bergman's film Autumn Sonata (1978). Twenty-five blocks away.
Autumn Sonata
https://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2017/08/227-autumn-sonata-1978-sweden-dir.html
Andre had walked twenty-five blocks thinking about this film about a woman who gave her life to her art at the expense of her daughters. And perhaps, though we speculate, he thought about his wife and children, whom he suddenly left, to give his life for his art.
And wept.
Wallace has told us it was odd for him to leave "because he loved his wife and children." He quotes Ingrid Bergman's character, Charlotte, who says, "I could always live in my art, but never in my life."
And immediately Andre appears and hugs Wally.
And we leave the theater thinking that we remember that Wallace said it about Andre himself rather than Charlotte.
Wallace tried to order a Club Soda, but the bar did not have it. So he accepted a Source de Pavillion.
Andre orders a Spritzer.
The men are seated and order.
These are the options they consider:
The Galuska--dumpling with raisins and blanched almonds.
Cailles des Raisin--grape quail.
Terrine de Poissons--fish prepared ahead of time and cooled in its container
Bramborova Polievka--potato soup
The first one is Hungarian. The next two are French. The last one is Slovak.
The men pass on the Galuska. They both order the grape quail as their entree. (Entree for Andre.) Andre gets the Terrine de Poissons as an appetizer. Wally gets the potato soup.
Then they jump right in to the conversation.
People sometimes talk about the film as if it is a movie exclusively about a conversation over dinner--as if it is carried exclusively by two men talking--but we are 10 minutes in before the men are seated and another several minutes to finish their order.
And when it does begin, you will notice that when the food comes, Andre does not eat. Louis Malle knew that it would not work for him to talk and eat at the same time, so he had him talk. Wallace also does not eat when he speaks, though he sometimes eats when he is listening.
Such as at the very moment Andre says--intending it to be a general statement of all people--"Are you really hungry or are you just stuffing your face?" And Louis Malle shows Wallace Shawn stuffing his face.
There is plenty of humor here.
ANDRE GREGORY is a polished storyteller. So Andre Gregory is a polished storyteller. He talks briskly. He knows what he is about to say. He does not have to stop and think about his next phrase. Listen for him to say uh or um. He does not say it. He says, "I mean" and "You know," and sometimes, "I mean, you know." But he does not say uh or um. Wallace, on the other hand, does.
The first story Andre tells is of his going to Poland with the Polish theater experimenter Jerzy Grotowski. Who is the perfect companion for this stage of Andre's travels. Grotowski wants Andre to teach. Andre feels he is tapped out of teaching. He feels like a failure. He has no directing in him, no teaching in him, no workshops, no improv, no scene study. So maybe this is what he needs.
He throws it out there, almost as a joke, that if Jerzy can find him 40 Jewish women who play the trumpet or harp, and hold the workshop in the woods, then Andre will come and teach the workshop. Perhaps he believes Jerzy will not find them, and he will not go.
But Jerzy finds them. 40 woman. Not all Jewish. And some interesting men. Who are all questioning the theater. Ready to experiment. And who all play some musical instrument, if not the trumpet or harp. And they will work in a forest. Which houses wild boar and a hermit.
None of them speak English.
Andre is satisfied. He goes. And this is when his life changes.
Andre discusses their theatrical experiments in the Polish woods. Sleeping all day. Working all night. Singing and dancing. Eating jam and bread. And cheese and tea. Sitting and waiting. Unable to speak to each other. Waiting for an impulse to strike someone. As when improvising with Chekhov.
Stanislavski said the actor should always ask himself, Who am I? Why am I here? Where do I come from? Where am I going?
But in this case, instead of applying those questions to a role, such as Sorin in The Seagull, you apply it to yourself.
As when a group of children come into a room without toys and begin to play. Adults are learning to play.
A woman brings a Teddy bear. Someone brings a sheet. Someone brings a bowl of water. We now have as many as 140 people present. All waiting on instinct. Andre gets the instinct. He grabs the Teddy bear and throws it in the air and an explosion happens.
He compares it to a human Jackson Pollack painting. As if all the people exploded onto the field like Pollack's paint on the canvas. Dancing. Singing. In two concentric circles. Moving in opposite directions.
There is an exhilarating aspect to Andre's description. If you are an actor and you have done some of these things, then, as bizarre as they sound, you might be ready to sign up.
So far.
Wallace, for his part, is perplexed.
Andre compares it to an American Indian Dance, which is logical, but then he compares it to Hitler's Nuremberg rallies, which scares Wally. His point being that everyone is wild and hypnotic.
Then he, as a man, starts "breastfeeding" the Teddy bear. He throws it to Jerzy and Jerzy does it. Jerzy throws the bear in the air and the group explodes into a human kaleidoscope.
When he uses this term we think of Busby Berkeley, the precision of which one can imagine these improvisations do not achieve, nor attempt.
He also compares it to a human cobweb.
They try touching the flame with their bare hands. They feel no pain with their left hand but do feel pain with their right hand. But by adjusting something in themselves, they are able to feel no pain with their right hands.
They sang Greek songs. They sang Polish songs. They sang songs of Saint Francis. They gave Andre the name Yendrush. They ate blueberries and chocolate and raspberry soup and rabbit stew.
Wallace is now fully skeptical. Andre is fully confident.
In 1981 they had no idea that Burning Man was coming.
Andre acknowledges that at that time his friends in New York thought that something was wrong with him. But he believes he has awakened something within him that has caused him to look directly at death. And he compares it to the impulse that caused Walt Whitman to write Leaves of Grass.
He tells a story about his experience with Antoine de Saint-Exupery's book The Little Prince. And a Japanese Buddhist priest named Kozan, who resembled Puck from A Midsummer Night's Dream. And their experience in the Sahara Desert. And how Kozan came and lived in Andre's house for six months. And walked on his wife's back. And did tricks to entertain the children.
But then Andre tells of having a vision during Christmas Mass. Of a 6'8" creature with blue skin approaching him. With violets growing out of his eyelids. And poppies growing out of his toenails. Telling him to hang in there. That he is doing all right.
Andre never mentions drugs.
Apparently he has these experiences while clean and sober.
Wallace awkwardly segues off blue skin and violets by asking Andre if he has seen the play The Violets Are Blue. Andre says No. Wallace says it is about people being strangled on a submarine.
Awkward pause.
The stories continue.
Andre goes to India.
Andre goes to Findhorn in Scotland.
People get the insects to leave the cabbages and cauliflowers alone by talking to them and making a deal with them. They give names to the appliances. They treat Helen the icebox with the same respect as Margaret their wife.
He finally does admit that he was hallucinating. He says it was like being in William Blake world.
Andre goes to Belgrade.
Andre goes to Montauk.
And back on Long Island, Wally really gets scared.
Because of what happened on Halloween night. It involves a group of people going off and preparing for the evening. At midnight on All Hallows Eve, when it is Andre's turn, they blindfold him, take him across a field, take him into a shed, strip him of all his clothes, take pictures of him, lead him naked through the field to an open grave, eight feet deep, lay him down in it, place his accessories on top of him, cover him with wood, and bury him alive for 30 minutes. From his description one gathers that they might have rigged a way for him to breathe; but otherwise, he is fully buried eight feet down in the dark.
When they do let him out, he is "resurrected." They run through the field and and drink wine and dance till dawn.
Andre goes to New York.
He compares the calm that comes on him to a chapter in Moby Dick that describes the wind going out of the sails.
He compares himself to Rip Van Winkle coming back from a long sleep.
He compares himself to Albert Speer. He is hard on himself.
When it is Wally's turn to respond, the two men debate different approaches to life and society and honesty an wakefulness. And it is a good discussion.
Andre does not always sound crazy. Not by any means. In fact, as I was watching, I felt that he vacillated among discussions of exhilarating theater work and bohemian experimentation while occasionally verging on mental illness.
He is such a lively, engaging, energetic, confident storyteller, that it is more like hearing a series of great experiences punctuated at times by red flags.
And one realizes that he wanted so badly to seek the truth, to face death head on, to feel so fully alive, that he skirted to toward the edge and came close to falling off.
Wallace wants to look at life another way. He wants to enjoy the details of daily existence. Wake up. Spend time with his companion Debby. Read Charlton Heston's autobiography, which is what he is currently reading. Earn a living. Pay his bills. Do his errands. Cross them off his to-do list. Write a play. And enjoy a good cup of cold coffee at night.
"I just don't think I feel the need for anything more."
"Why not just lean back and enjoy these details?"
He makes a good rebuttal.
A delicious cup of coffee and a piece of coffeecake.
Wallace appeals to science and the scientific method. He compares Andre's efforts to superstitions of the Dark Ages.
He uses the fortune cookie as an illustration of how none of these things have a mystical connection to one another. They are just written by a fortune cookie writer and printed at the factory, and when he reads it, he takes a moment to imagine how it might apply to his life, as a game, but then he moves on and forgets about it, because it has no connection to his life and does not mean anything. It is a well written and well delivered monologue.
There is another great discussion about electric blankets and technology.
They go back and forth for awhile, both of them making good arguments. Both of them contributing ideas to how one might want to live and not want to live.
There is a beautiful moment when Andre gets a little loud, and we cut over to the Waiter, who is manning his post. He gives the perfect look, right down the middle, which could mean that he is concerned or it could mean nothing more than he is checking on his customers.
When he walks over to clear plates from the table, he asks--
Is everything all right, Gentlemen?
With the perfect level of composure for it, again, to convey both meanings. Perhaps he is checking on their volume and emotional status, but perhaps all he is doing is asking if they would like something else. A beautifully acted and directed moment.
Instead of desert, they both get an espresso and Wallace adds an amaretto.
When dinner is over, Andre surprises Wallace by paying, so Wallace takes the money he had brought for dinner and splurges on a taxi. As he rides, he points out to us locations that have significance in his memory.
The place where he bought a suit with his father.
The place where he had an ice cream soda after school.
Wallace is grounded in the details of life. The little things. Meaning.
He tells us that he goes home and tells Debby about his dinner with Andre.
Andre Gregory feels his life has been a failure. So he goes on a quest to try to find meaning.
Wallace Shawn feels tremendous fear. So he stays in his ordered space to live his life the best he can.
This film is an acting tour de force. WALLACE SHAWN and ANDRE GREGORY play personalities that are not far apart from their own, even though their characters are fictional.
They spent six months, about three days a week, improvising the conversation while being taped in a room. Then Wallace Shawn spent a year writing the script from hundreds of pages of transcriptions.
Then they memorized their lines. Long passages of them. And rehearsed over and over in order to make their physical movements seem natural and spontaneous.
They looked for a director, and they assumed the film was a personal work of art, and that only their family and friends would be interested in watching it.
They had a hard time finding a director, but through a serendipitous exchange, the script made its way into Louis Malle's hands.
We already know from films such as Zazie dans le Metro (1960) and Black Moon (1978) that Louis Malle had an affection for Alice in Wonderland, and it was through Alice in Wonderland that Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory met. Gregory was directing a stage run of Alice in Wonderland, and Shawn thought it was so wonderful that he arranged to see it every performance. Gregory was clearly impressed, and they met, and Gregory followed up with Shawn about a year later when Shawn, who wrote prolifically, was staying in a motel in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to write another play. At that point, according to Gregory, Shawn said he had written a dozen plays but no one had produced them yet. So Gregory did. And the two have collaborated quite a bit since.
When I was watching the movie, my 11-year old walked into the room and said, "Hey! That's the guy from The Princess Bride." Later, my 12-year old walked into the room and said, "Hey! That's the guy from The Princess Bride."
Inconceivable.
And for the record, Wallace Shawn does use the word one time in this film, which came out six years before Rob Reiner's classic fairy tale.
He says, "I just don't think I feel the need for anything more than all this. Whereas, you know, you seem to be saying that it's inconceivable that anybody could be having a meaningful life today."
* * * *
Hostility from people who like me.
ha ha ha hee hee hee ho ho ho
glance
Is everything all right, Gentlemen?
glare
Talking about the death of that girl in the car with Kennedy and people will be roaring with laughter.
I never understand what's going on at a party. I'm always completely confused.
One of the reasons that we don't know what's going on is when we're there at a party, we're too busy performing.
Performance in a theater is sort of superfluous, and sort of obscene.
A doctor will live up to our expectations of how a doctor should look. Terrorists always look like terrorists.
Privately, people are very mixed up about themselves. They don't know what to do with their lives.
By performing these roles all the time . . .
Suppose you're going through some kind of hell in your own life . . .
We just don't dare ask each other.
We don't put any value at on all reality.
Emphasis on our careers makes perceiving reality . . .
You can really shut your mind off for years.
Our minds are just focused on these goals and plans, which are not reality.
Goals and plans are fantasy. They're part of a dream life.
They live each moment by habit. They're telling the same stories over and over again.
Do things with his left hand all day in order to break the habit of living.
Just to keep seeing, feeling, remembering.
Are you really hungry or are you just stuffing your face, because that's what you do out of habit?
It's like being lobotomized by watching television.
The seasons don't affect us.
I'm looking for more comfort, because the world is very abrasive.
Don't you see that comfort can be dangerous?
We're having a lovely, comfortable time, and meanwhile we're starving because we're not getting any substance.
Martin Buber, Hasidism
Prayer is the action of liberating these enchained spirits.
Every action of ours should be a prayer, a sacrament in the world.
the way we treat other people
Mr. Gregory, Jimmy
An act of murder is committed when I walk into that building.
He become a child and I'm an adult because I can buy my way into the building.
Eleanore Duse - a light, a mist
Bertoldt Brecht
The people today are so deeply asleep.
It's very hard to know what to do in the theater.
If you put on serious contemporary plays, you may only be helping to dim the audience in a different way.
If you show people that they cannot reach each other and they are isolated
They know their own lives and that relationships are difficult and painful.
a terrible universe of rapes and murders
The play tells them that their impression of the world is correct and there is nothing they can do.
ritual, love, surprise, denouement, beginning, middle, end
It didn't dim me. It brought me to life.
No way to wake people up anymore except to involve them in some kind of strange christening in Poland.
Everybody can't be taken to Everest.
There must have been periods where in order to give people a strong experience
You could have written Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen and people would have had an experience.
Isn't it legitimate for writer to write a play so that people can see it?
Isn't New York real?
I think if you can become aware of what really existed in the cigar store next to this restaurant it would blow your brains out.
Reality is just as real in the cigar store as it is in Mount Everest.
7th avenue
I agree with you but people can't see the cigar store.
It may be that ten years from now people will pay ten thousand dollars in cash to be castrated just to feel something.
Are people bored spoiled children?
OK, yes. We are bored. We are bored now. The process may be a self-perpetuating brain washing.
All of this is much more dangerous than one thinks.
Somebody who is bored is asleep, and somebody who is asleep will not say no.
Gustav Bjornstrand
Orwellian nightmare. Everything you're haring now turns you in to a robot.
New York is the model for the new concentration camp where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves.
This is a pine tree. Escape before it's too late.
The whole world is going in the same direction.
The 1960s was the last burst of creativity.
Now its robots thinking nothing and feeling nothing.
History and memory are being erased.
Nobody will remember that life happened on earth.
We're going back to a safe period.
Pocket of light springing up in different parts of the world.
Why not just lean back and enjoy these details?
I don't know what you're talking about.
People could believe anything.
With the development of science--
The universe has some shape and order. Trees do not turn into people or goddesses.
The things you're talking about--you found the hand print in the book and there were three Andres and one Antoine, and that was coincidence. You think it was put together 40 years ago and it was planned for you.
No comments:
Post a Comment