BY: ANDREW C

Forget The Secret. A simple dinner conversation brings enlightenment in Louis Malle's film about perspective and friendship in the modern world.

This weekend I watched Louis Malle’s 1981 film "My Dinner with Andre." The entire film is based around a dinner meeting between old friends Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory and seems to exist as something between a documentary and a performance piece. Shawn and Gregory play themselves and wrote the screenplay. They eat dinner. The camera rolls.

It begins with Wally reluctantly taking the subway to the restaurant where they are due to meet. Wally hasn’t talked to his old friend in the few years that Andre has been traveling the world, engaging in various mystical experiences. He’s worried about Andre, worried about how he’s changed, and very uncomfortable about how the evening might go. He decides to make the encounter easier by using his familiar tactic of asking questions.

Andre doesn’t seem to need much prodding as he jumps into detailing his encounters, ranging from an Eastern European forest retreat to Findhorn to Tibet. Wally, entrenched in the realities of his life as a struggling playwright in New York, is visibly uncomfortable with Andre’s stories. He doesn’t know how his friend could have been brainwashed like this. Not sure how to respond Wally can only contribute to the conversation by repeatedly asking, “What happened next?”

But then, as Andre relates a story about something a doctor said when his mother was dying, there is a shift. The conversation turns away from the specifics of the mystical experiences and toward the specifics of the personal interactions they have both experienced. Wally and Andre become involved in a deeper conversation about people and relationships and how the modern world seems to train people to cut themselves off from each other and their feelings.

The conclusion is more subtle than profound. No real answer is arrived at, but the discussion is fascinating. The dialogue between two friends who care about each other, but have come to vastly different perspectives on the world, is engaging. And it gives you hope to see that people can disagree, but still explore the nature of that disagreement and have their differing viewpoints enlightened by the experience.

In the end, this is no New Age safety blanket of good intentions. But neither is it a bleak view over the precipice of personal isolation in the modern world. It is something in between. It gives hope that if we are willing to engage in the conversation, we might come out better for it.

Andrew Coltrin has several Nigerian pen pals, each of whom need his help in transferring several million dollars out of their country. When not busy with correspondence, he has been known to do some very time consuming things like parent a six-year old child and form an art collective. The child is, of course, a genius. The art collective, Look for Signage, has produced three ingenious issues of the literary journal Bony Landmarks (the latest issue of which can be found at the Speedway Bookmans store). Andrew lives in Tucson with his legally recognized life-partner Jessica.