‘My Dinner with Andre’ and ‘Melvin Goes to Dinner’: making movies out of the mundane
One of my all-time favourite pastimes is watching people do nothing; from aimless wandering to meandering conversations to idle side quests, I love it all. When we watch people in their quiet moments, removed from the distraction of busyness and the noise of everyday chaos, we can see them for who they really are, and it is perhaps this very quality that makes slow cinema so hypnotic.
We watch people walk around, eat breakfast and get ready for bed, and by doing so, it creates an untarnished portrait of who they truly are. Sometimes, we are most vulnerable in our quiet moments when there is nothing to hide behind, and over the years, a whole sub-genre of cinema has revolved around this very idea, specifically around the dinner table.
There are many directors that understand the mesmerising quality that comes from simply watching a conversation unfold, with directors like Richard Linklater and Eric Rohmer showing the unpredictable ways that our words can evolve as they’re spoken, through long and uninterrupted takes as characters voice their thoughts and ideas. But some directors took this to a new extreme, creating entire films that show people having entirely uninterrupted conversations over dinner that happen in real-time.
While Louis Malle is known for the high-stakes drama of Elevator to the Gallows, his 1981 film My Dinner with Andre took a completely different turn. It shows two old friends, Andre and Wally, who reunite for dinner one evening after not seeing each other in a while. Over the next 90 minutes, we become completely immersed in their conversation as they discuss the goings on in their lives since their last meeting, sharing their worries and musings on the world around them and their place in it.
Malle beautifully shows how sometimes the people less present in our lives can have the biggest impact, and the fleeting connections we make are sometimes the ones that most encourage us to change. Over the course of this one evening, we see two completely different outlooks on the best way to live, with both men creating a safe bubble for each other to freely voice their perspectives. Sometimes, it is easier to be honest with the people who know us the least, and by having dinner with an old friend, Wally can take a step back and look at who he is becoming.
In a similarly titled film called Melvin Goes to Dinner, directed by none other than Bob Odenkirk in 2003, he uses a similar staging by showing a group of people who don’t really know each other and just happen to have dinner one night. Odenkirk plays with the idea of narration by taking us on a journey as we explore each character and what happened to them immediately before joining the dinner party. It creates a vibrant portrait of the quandaries of adult life, with all of them engaging in heated conversations around religion, infidelity and fetishes, with many plot twists along the way as we discover new information about a character through someone else’s perspective.
While some understandably criticise this genre, it invites into the inner world of the people on screen in a way that we rarely see; the directors don’t cut between actions and disturb the natural flow of interaction — they sit in the entirety of the moment and allow us to dwell in every lull and rush of conversation. It is one of the more grounding and authentic moments we can see on the big screen, becoming so naturalistic that it almost becomes experimental. The dialogue of the film is what creates the narrative, placing importance on the words we speak and the way that sometimes the best bit about any relationship is the talk.
