by ·Comments Off on Vanya on 42nd Street (1994, Louis Malle)

Relaxed film, supposedly a full rehearsal of the Chekhov play in a disused theater, director Andre Gregory and the small audience only seen at the beginning and during act breaks. Camera crew is onstage, so it’s an immersive drama that doubles as a distancing experiment. Everyone loves the important professor, come to his country home with hot new wife Julianne Moore, but as the days go on, all the men fall for Julianne and lose respect for the professor, who plans to repay their years of work on his estate by selling it off and making them homeless. Local doctor who never seems to go home is Larry Pine, the professor in Q, and thankfully I didn’t recognize this movie’s professor as the Police Academy commandant because that would have been so distracting. MVP Brooke Smith (the girl who puts the lotion in the basket in Silence of the Lambs).

Wallace Vanya with Moore and Lynn Cohen:

by ·Comments Off on My Dinner With Andre (1981, Louis Malle)

Opens with Wallace Shawn in voiceover – he’s a playwright taking acting gigs, doing odd errands, going to dinner tonight with a man he’s been avoiding for years, once a friend and colleague and a celebrated theater director before he disappeared. The voiceover comes back to interrupt even after they start talking, but mostly Andre’s stories begin to take over the film.

“It has something to do with living.” Andre isn’t new age or hippie exactly, but very all-things-are-connected, seeing signs, everything is beautiful, living life for the first time, unusual coincidences, etc. He went to a forest in Poland to teach forty musical women about theater, compares the group’s trance activity to Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies, after which Wallace gives him a great look. Andre had a bad trip to the desert with a Japanese monk, was buried alive in India, compares himself to Albert Speer. When Wallace finally gets a whole line in, Andre mentions nazi death camps, what is it with this guy?

After Andre dominates for the first half, Wallace gets to tell a story of his own, which is about not being able to express himself. Andre says we’re all bored because of capitalism, and volunteers that New York is a concentration camp. References to Brecht, Sense & Sensibility, The Little Prince, Autumn Sonata. This is all leading to a blow-out fight, when Wallace can’t take his friend’s nonsense anymore – but it doesn’t, it leads to a good-natured disagreement. I can’t say I thought this movie was all that special for most of its runtime, or could figure out what it was getting at, but I can say it was a shock to experience good-natured disagreement in the climax of a film, and this should happen more often.