My Dinner with Andre

My Dinner with Andre is a 1981 American comedy-drama film directed by Louis Malle, and written by and starring André Gregory and Wallace Shawn as fictionalized versions of themselves sharing a conversation at Café des Artistes in Manhattan. The film's dialogue covers topics such as experimental theater, the nature of theater, and the nature of life, and contrasts Andre's spiritual experiences with Wally's modest humanism. Plot Struggling playwright Wally dreads having dinner with his old friend Andre, whom he has been avoiding since Andre gave up his career as a theater director in 1975 and embarked on an extended spiritual midlife crisis including: synchronicity, eastern spirituality, near-death experience and utopian communes. In a fancy New York restaurant, Andre tells Wally about some of the adventures he has had since they last saw each other, which include working with his mentor, the director Jerzy Grotowski, and a group of Polish actors in a forest in Poland, traveling to the Sahara to try to create a play based on The Little Prince by Saint-Exupéry, and visiting Findhorn in Scotland. The last in this string of events was when Andre and a small group of friends arranged Halloween-themed experiences for each other, and one piece consisted of the participants being briefly buried alive. While Andre says he needed to do all of these things to get out of the rut he was in and learn how to be human, Wally argues that living as Andre has done for the past several years is simply not possible for most people, and he describes how he finds pleasure in more ordinary things, like a cup of coffee or his new electric blanket. Andre asserts that focusing too much on comfort can be dangerous, and says that what passes for normal life in New York in the late 1970s is more akin to living in a dream than living in reality. While Wally agrees with many of Andre's criticisms of modern society, he takes issue with the more mystical aspects of Andre's stories, as he has a rational and scientific worldview.