My Dinner with Andre, 1981, dir. Louis Malle. Watched at home on a Criterion DVD provided by my pal James, Saturday, October 8.

I feel like a lot of people are aware of My Dinner with Andre without having seen it, and that’s probably as it should be. Watching it for the first time, the result of being given the Criterion DVD from a great friend from Richmond, VA (where the interior restaurant scenes were shot), I was struck by how in the 1980s there were so many of these “talking” pictures—Spalding Gray and Eric Bogosian, films where men really just talk, to the camera or one another, telling stories.

My Dinner with Andre works only because of Wallace Shawn, who should be talking more. It’s damn hard to relate to André Gregory, whose search for… something, comes off as pretentious and insufferable, just like his choice of restaurant. Shawn seems baffled and angry at times, and you really just want him to dump a salad on Gregory. Or at least I did.

But their waiter! Their waiter is a grouchy, old, white-haired man, played by Jean Lenauer, an Austrian actor who died two years after this was released. What hair! What a look! Servile and critical, and at one point, when he emerges from the kitchen, cigarette in his mouth (that he brusquely crushes out on a table en route to taking our heroes’ dessert order), I was immediately struck by how much I wished the film were about him.