Word: andre
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...DINNER WITH ANDR...
...Manhattan restaurant, a round, balding actor-playwright named Wallace Shawn sits down to dinner with a lean, overarticulate theatrical director named André Gregory. The friends have not seen one another for some years mostly because Gregory has spent that time searching the world for transcendental experiences. He has been to adult play groups in Poland, Scotland, Tibet, the Sahara-and Montauk Point. It is a measure of what is wrong with this movie (and maybe with the culture of the '80s) that neither man sees anything funny about the intrusion of that last prosaic place on this otherwise...
...they have are politely put. Shawn seeks a certain comfort in routine; Gregory obviously seeks the intensification of experience that can result from a daily questioning of one's routines. Neither wants to pick a fight or, for that matter, make a convert. At most, it would seem, André wants to make certain that his odyssey was not in vain, that he learned something for his trouble. And, it must be said, there are several anecdotes that are not without interest in the retell ing, one or two observations about the ways of the world that are acute...
...conception My Dinner with André is interesting in a kind of off-off Broadway way. One can imagine trendy New York twittering about it for weeks - well, any way, days. And if the protagonists were, by nature, men of Shavian wit and intellectual range it might have worked. But they are merely fake profound, in the show biz manner. Their pose may be antitheatrical, but the pair are, in fact, theatrical in the very worst, or drama student, sense of the term...
...themselves, and it is the most august room in the show. Yet there are surprises-notably the suite of "hostages" by Jean Fautrier, human presences rendered down into a thick anonymous protein of paint, which were exhibited in Paris just after the Liberation (with a catalogue preface by André Malraux) and are still among the most striking images of pathos and mute, intractable survival that the war evoked from the West. The monochromes of Yves Klein, a curiously underrated compound of Duchampian dandy and body artist from the '50s, prefigure much that would happen on the conceptual fringes...