Andre Gregory: Before and After Dinner

One of the many pleasures of Cindy Kleine’s documentary about her husband Andre Gregory, which recently previewed at Film Forum (it’s opening there on April 3rd), is watching the ongoing rehearsal of Wallace Shawn’s translation of The Master Builder. The rehearsal radiates retrospectively over the entire film, encapsulating Gregory with some degree of irony and a great deal of seriousness under the blanket of Ibsen’s masterpiece about the artistic personality. Gregory has always been Shawn’s master builder creating the parameters for Shawn’s quirky teleology. It’s apparent that Shawn’s famous tete a tete with Gregory dictates the style of both Vanya on 42nd Street and The Master Builder—which are conversational in the best sense of the word. Kleine’s direction lovingly captures her husband’s facial expressions and in particular his hands as they react to intimate directorial moments, but her film fundamentally embraces Gregory by paying homage to his esthetic. After all it's called Andrew Gregory: Before and After Dinner and it’s more my dinner with Andre than My Dinner with Andre could ever be (after she eats with him all the time). Besides the extent to which the film is about a host of Gregory’s interests that range from shamanism to the Polish director Jerzy Grotowski, there is the drama of history. Gregory’s father was a Jew who left Russia before Stalin, escaped Germany while remaining curiously connected to influential Nazis, and brought his family to America from England on the last boat, departing on the eve of the bombing of Britain—something that may account for
Gregory's love of ocean liners, but does little to shed light on the question of his father’s enigmatic character. “You can’t go back,” is the filmmaker’s final word on he subject. “Access Denied. Where Andre found his father was in his work.”

My Night at Maud's, My Dinner with Andre

There are certain timeless moments that mean a lot to you and no one else. In early adolescence, these take the form of overheated exchanges in which the tiniest hint of interest from a fetching member of the opposite sex creates volcanic eruptions of meaning, which are the first of what will become a lifetime of misunderstandings. Essentially, human beings are totally isolated from the moment they emerge from the protective lining of the uterus, which may be the reason why shooting heroin—one way of trying to recreate the oceanic symbiosis of gestation—is called mainlining. There are times when conversation may actually create a reciprocal feeling of connection, as exemplified in the films of Eric Rohmer, in particular My Night at Maud’s. (My Dinner With Andre is another example of this connecting-over-dinner genre.) But the Pascalian wager at the heart of Rohmer’s film, which infuses the discussion with the notion of faith, is precisely what is absent in most interactions between human beings, which are usually defined by urges that lack the conviction of the higher purpose in which they are masked. Arthur Janov’s Primal Scream may be a vestige of an earlier era of trendy psychiatry, which expressed the value of emoting (often within a group context), but it is curiously accurate in epitomizing the condition in which we are born and in which we die—which is to say totally alone. Life is bookended with the traumas of birth and death, but in this sandwich of despair are numerous little tales, of lust and love, of friendship and remorse, in which the harsh truths of the human condition are gift wrapped and placed under the Yule tree, along with Santa’s other spurious gifts. 

Dinner at Eight

There is a certain type of litigiousness that takes the form of parsimony. Who would have believed that the arc of Louis Malle’s My Dinner with André would result in Wally Shawn, with his sparing, deer-in-headlights interlocutions, eliciting a searing indictment of his witness?

The initial argument of the now-classic film, recently revived at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater, is this: to feel alive is to be acutely aware of the imminence of death. The eponymous protagonist, André Gregory, will go to any length to avoid the routine and mechanical behavior that renders life devoid of its exultant uniqueness. There are no roles left in the theater, Gregory insists, no Gordon Craigs, no Eleanor Duses, since people in modern life are so busy acting out their own roles. Only in extreme experiences that strip away costume, only through climbing Mt Everest or journeying to the Polish wilderness to study with the legendary director Jerzy Grotowski, can one approach an authentic experience of reality.

I don’t buy any of this Shawn chimes in mischievously. I like my coffee in the morning. I like my little plays. I like to go to the occasional party. I like to see my wife. I don’t need Everest. I don’t believe in omens. I look at fortune cookies, but I don’t believe that someone in a fortune cookie factory actually knows anything about me.

What Louis Malle created in My Dinner with André is an old fashioned Socratic dialogue, in which the central issues of life and death, transcendence and acceptance, are dealt out like a hand of cards. The film, made in l981, is as immortal as any of the great Greek dramas. Louis Malle’s transparent style of direction makes a great work of fiction look like a documentary.