My Dinner with Andre

In this captivating and philosophical film directed by Louis Malle, actor and playwright Wallace Shawn sits down with his friend the theater director André Gregory at a restaurant on New York’s Upper West Side, and the pair proceed through an alternately whimsical and despairing confessional about love, death, money, and all the superstition in between. Playing variations on their own New York–honed personas, Shawn and Gregory, who also cowrote the screenplay, dive in with introspective intellectual gusto, and Malle captures it all with a delicate, artful detachment. A fascinating freeze-frame of cosmopolitan culture, My Dinner with André remains a unique work in cinema history.

This is a movie I have been aware of pretty much since it came out, although as a 15-year-old in pre-Chelsea North Carolina, it seemed more like the kind of movie you read about rather than went to. Now is our chance to stop reading about it and actually see it.

Showtime is 2:40, so I made our start time the oddly specific 2:25 so we'd get there 15 minutes early. I went ahead and bought my ticket, but there's no assigned seating and I'm guessing it won't sell out - your call. Afterwards let's walk over to Thai at Main St for an early dinner and discussion.