Three of the Best Movies You (Probably) Haven't Seen
POSTED 2/26/2018
POSTED 2/26/2018
The 1981 art-house film My Dinner with André has Wallace Shawn and André Gregory playing fictionalized versions of themselves. The film is (literally) all talk and no action - a premise you would think makes it unwatchable. Yet the dinner companions are masterful story-tellers and this eccentric movie is as enchanting as it is intellectually stimulating.
The film opens with Wally on his way to meet a close friend whom he has avoided for years. André had dropped out of sight – reportedly traveling in search of transcendent experiences. He's back in New York now and has been seen sobbing and “talking to trees”. Wally and André arrange to meet in an upscale restaurant that André frequents.
Most of the first half of the movie is André's near-monologue on his travels – doing theatrical improv in a forest in Poland, visiting Tibet, journeying through the dunes of the Sahara with a Buddhist monk, and engaging in a ritual ceremony on Long Island where he was (nearly) buried alive. André relates some of the events that caused him to re-examine his life and lead him on his quest. He says he had reached the point where he felt he had “just squandered his life.” Upon his return to New York he found people were living in a fantasy world – not recognizing the reality in front of them. Wally and André agree that most people today are living by habit – "which is not really living." André relates a story on the founding of Findhorn and the exercises developed by one of the founders to break the “habits of living” so that he could keep “seeing, feeling, remembering.”
The movie gradually shifts to an intellectual argument. Wally has a hard time accepting André's view of the world. Speaking as a scientific rationalist, Wally rejects omens and coincidences. He is happy with his life as it is - sleeping under his electric blanket and waking to find a cup of yesterday's coffee “that no cockroach or fly has died in overnight”. He doesn't feel the need for anything more and cannot see why one has to go to Mt. Everest (for example) to experience reality. “I don't really know what you're talking about,” he tells André.
Although they challenge each other, they both admit to confusion and doubts, as only close friends could. The empathy they once felt for each other is rekindled. Each has found a way to live and is trying to wake the other up. Dinner is over, André pays for the meal, Wally treats himself to a taxi home. On the drive downtown, Wally recalls scenes from his childhood growing up in Manhattan - prompted perhaps by one of André's remarks (“A baby holds your hands, and then suddenly, there's this huge man lifting you off the ground, and then he's gone. Where's that son?”). When Wally gets home, his girlfriend Debbie is home from work and he tells her “everything about my dinner with André.”
"The Findhorn Foundation is [a] collective of spiritual gardeners in northern Scotland that was virtually the prototype of the modern New Age community. The group...became world-famous and an international hippie shrine for its original philosophy of interacting with plants and has gone on to become a kind of alternative university of personal growth."- from a 2001 article in the UK Independent
"At times ''My Dinner with Andre'' suggests a reunion of Christopher Robin (Mr. Gregory) and Winnie-the-Pooh (Mr. Shawn) 30 years after each has left the nursery to pursue separate careers in the theater." - Vincent Canby, New York Times, Oct. 8, 1981
Based on a short story by Isak Dinesen, Babette's Feast is the story of two sisters, Filippa and Martine. It is set in a small, remote Danish village in the late 1800's. Led by their pastor, the few dozen souls there practice an austere form of Christianity. Although both sisters received marriage offers, they never leave the village – their father, the pastor, disapproved of their suitors. Instead they spend their years keeping house for their father and taking care of him until his death.
Years later, Babette, a refugee from the Franco-Prussian War comes to the village. She has a letter of introduction from Filippa's former suitor, a singing instructor now living in Paris. Since the sisters have no money, Babette offers to cook and keep house for free. She help the sisters care for the dwindling, aging congregation. When Babette wins a lottery, she uses her entire windfall to prepare a French feast for the village. The villagers have pledged to each other that they will not speak of the food or the feast in keeping with their strict beliefs. This leads to some humorous moments when one of the guests - an aging, worldly general and Martine's former suitor who has been long absent from the village – tries to engage them in appreciating the gourmet feast. Over the course of the meal (so sumptuous that some have called Babette's Feast, a “food film”), the villagers learn that “bliss” and “righteousness” can co-exist as can mercy and truth.
The Best of Youth follows the lives of two idealistic brothers, Nicola and Matteo Carati, who are separated by turbulent events in 1960's Italy. Italy has recovered from World War II and has begun to modernize. We follow the brothers, their family and friends through four decades on a beautifully-filmed emotional roller-coaster ride. The ride begins when the brothers interrupt a summer trip to Norway's North Cape and attempt to free a young woman from a psychiatric hospital. The brothers then go their individual ways. Matteo enters the police force; Nicola becomes a psychiatrist and raises a child with a woman who joins the Red Brigade. But always there is the family bond. The Florence flood of 1966, the 1968 student protests, the factory layoffs and closings of the 1970's, the Red Brigade, and the Mafia all figure in the plot lines as the emotionally-charged drama unwinds across Italy – in Turin, Rome, Palermo, and Tuscany's Val d'Orcia. The characters are so well-drawn that by the end of the movie you feel that you know them. Their joys become your joys; their sorrows, your sorrows. The last scene is in Norway where a member of the youngest generation of Carati's completes the journey to the North Cape. “I think of my father, mother, and you. How you've always said that everything was beautiful. I think you were right. Everything is truly beautiful.” - RJC, 2/26/18
"The acting is electric. By the end of this haunting, hypnotic film, you feel you have watched lives being lived, not just imagined." - Peter Travers, Rolling Stone