Ben Harris-Roxas

A long review, based on my attempts to understand why I keep being drawn back to this small but profound film.

There is a moment about forty minutes into My Dinner with Andre when Wallace Shawn's face does something amazing. Andre Gregory is mid-monologue, he’s been mid-monologue for what feels like weeks, describing a ritual burial in New England, being placed in a coffin on All Soul's Eve while people sang over him. Wally is listening with an expression that sits precisely between being enraptured and panicked. The camera holds on to him. And in that moment, something the film has been building quietly becomes visible: we see a man in the process of being changed by language. Not persuaded. Not converted. Changed by the extended encounter with another person's inner life.

This is what My Dinner with Andre is about, and it’s why I find myself drawn to it again and again. It is a subject of almost unbearable relevance in 2026 but almost unimaginable distance from how we live now, 45 years gayer it was made.

The film itself has no interest in being relevant to anything.

The premise is genuinely unpromising. Two middle-aged New York theatre people - Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, playing versions of themselves, or playing themselves playing versions of themselves - have dinner at a fancy restaurant. Andre talks, mostly. Wally listens, mostly. They eat roasted quail. They drink wine. That's it. Louis Malle was asked why he directed it this way, and the honest answer is embedded in the film itself - this is the only way it could be done. Any attempt to open it up, to cut away, to vary the pace, to give the viewer something to look at other than these two faces, would have destroyed the thing it was trying to capture.

What it is trying to capture is interiority iself. Not ideas, though there are plenty of those. Andre’s monologues range across experimental theatre workshops in a Polish forest, eating sand in the Sahara with a Japanese Buddhist monk, a commune in Scotland where a mathematician claimed to see fauns, a burial ritual in which he lay in a coffin and was wept over by strangers. These are the stories of a man in profound spiritual crisis who also has money and connections and therefore gets to enact his crises in unusually exotic ways. It would be easy to be dismissive. Wally, to his credit, almost is. His early voiceover positions Andre as someone who has "gone mad”. A cautionary tale of the theatre-world mystic, the species that has mistaken its own existential vertigo for enlightenment.

But Gregory's performance is more complex than that. What he brings to these stories is not self-satisfaction but a quality of anguished searching, a sense that he is telling these stories in order to understand them himself, that the telling is the understanding, and that Wally is not merely an audience but a necessary component for sense-making. He raises an index finger before many of his statements, a tiny, compulsive gesture that comes across as someone trying to hold onto a thought that keeps threatening to dissolve. His face in close-up is remarkable. Classically aquiline with intense eyes that seem lit by something uncomfortable within.

Shawn's counter-performance is the film's secret weapon. He is, physically, everything Gregory is not. Round where Gregory is angular, still where Gregory is kinetic, deliberately earthly where Gregory is aiming for the ineffable.

Wally has a plan for surviving the dinner. Treat it like detective work, ask questions, stay curious, don't get sucked in. For a long time this works. The early “uh huhs" and "then what happeneds" are not passive - they’re Wally maintaining a careful distance from something he suspects might be dangerous to his sense of inner quilibrium.

The equilibrium breaks, famously, over an electric blanket. Andre has been arguing that modern comfort insulates us from reality, that our heated apartments and familiar routines function as a kind of anaesthetic against authentic experience. Wally, who has been cold and poor without artifice or performance, disagrees with a directness that surprises. He would never give up his electric blanket, because New York is cold, life is hard, and the small consolations are not luxuries but necessities. This is not a trivial rejoinder. It is a genuine philosophical position, and it arrives with the force of someone who has not thought it so much as lived it.

From this point the film becomes something different. What had been a performance becomes a conversation. Richard Gilmore, reading the film through Epicurean philosophy in his essay The Strange Attractions of the Epicurean Swerve in My Dinner with Andre, describes this as a "phase transition”, the moment when a system crosses into a new state. His framing is a bit earnest but the underlying observation is correct - something shifts, and the shift is irreversible. Wally begins to contribute stories of his own: New York parties that felt grotesque, friends who couldn't acknowledge genuine emotion, the particular loneliness of being surrounded by people performing sociability. Andre, who has spent the whole film up until then talking, begins to listen.

What the film understands that this kind of transformation can only happen through duration. You cannot rush. Andre’s meandering, seemingly self-indulgent odyssey through the first hour of the dinner is not preamble, it’s the mechanism. The listener has to be worn down. The defences have to soften not through argument but through sheer accumulation. Wally's conversion is less like a decision than a weather event. It happens to him rather than being chosen by him.

The film ends with Wally in a taxi, watching Manhattan slide past in the dark. His voiceover in this final sequence is different in quality from the defensive, anxious narration of the opening. It’s looser, more associative, each building connected to a memory, each memory opening onto another.

What Andre gave Wally was not a new set of opinions. It was access to his own interiority, unlocked by prolonged exposure to someone else's. This is what deep listening actually does, when it happens, which is rare. It doesn't change what you think. It changes how much of yourself you can see.

It is difficult to watch this and not feel the weight of what the current moment has arranged against it. Not in any nostalgic or technophobic spirit (he film is certainly not an ad for New York of the 1980s). But the specific conditions the film requires - sustained attention, tolerance of asymmetry, willingness to sit in discomfort while something slowly organises itself, the patience to let another person talk for a very long time before getting to the point - are conditions that the contemporary world actively trains out of us.

The short video, the take, the scroll. These represent a systematic re-education of our attention, away from the capacity depicted in this film.

Andre Gregory's stories are not TED-talks. They do not resolve neatly, if at all. They circle, they go too far, they weave between self-indulgence and madness. The one about eating sand in the Sahara is genuinely hard to process. The point is not the sand-eating. The point is what it costs to keep listening to him makes possible. The film asks the viewer to stay with something difficult and unresolved for two hours. It is less entertainment than a form of practice.

Malle, I think, understands all of this and his direction is an act of faith in the material (Shawn’s plays and his collection of essays are masterful and open a world of their own, but that’s a digression for another time). He follows classic shot/reverse-shot convention but with a few subtle distortions. Andre’s face doubled in a mirror behind the table to create a sense of a divided self watching itself speak. The waiter, grave and foreign-accented, moves through the frame like a figure from another register of experience (an Igor, in thePratchett sense?), periodically reminding Wally and Andre that the world outside their conversation continues to exist. The confined restaurant setting becomes instead a kind of laboratory (echoes Igor again, which makes on wonder who the Frankenstein is and who is the monster), all controlled except the two people and the time.

It is a film that does not move at all, and yet something happens in it. That is either nothing at all or a definition of what conversation, at its best, can actually be.

This post first appeared on Letterboxd.