My essay on the new Criterion released of My Dinner With Andre, one of the most unlikely American independent cinema success stories of all time, is now running on Turner Classic Movies Online. It’s a fiction based on autobiography, with theater director Andre Gregory and playwright (and sometime actor) Wallace Shawn portraying fictionalized versions of themselves, named Andre and Wally, in a staged conversation shot on the elaborate set of an expensive (but imaginary) restaurant in the manner of a documentary by French director Louis Malle.

Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory share a little dinner conversation

It’s at once awesome and unreal. Gregory really did travel as a spiritual pilgrim seeking meaning in life and he recounts his tales with the dynamic intensity of a performing storyteller. His stories and philosophical musings can be compelling if you let yourself get carried away by Gregory’s passion, which is as genuine (if exaggerated for the film; Gregory credits Malle with bringing out a somewhat manic quality) as his adventures. But there’s also an element of the pretentious New York dilettante who escapes the yoke of work to indulge in the travel and cultural wanderlust out of the reach of the rest of us. Wally, meanwhile, is skeptical of the spiritual odyssey and defensive of his own modest experiences and his way of life. Perhaps he takes Andre’s critique of the modern life as an empty existence a personal criticism. Perhaps it’s a competitive streak that compels him to intellectually wrestle with Andre.

The result is an intellectual bull session as cinematic performance piece, a dynamic dinner conversation between active artists who have known each other long enough to let down a few defenses and let loose some wild ideas and confessions. It is also the pretentious proclamations and justifications of two privileged men who can afford a meal at an upscale New York eatery, batting around the meaning of life while working folk, more noticed by the audience than the characters themselves, modestly wait on them and then wait for them to finish: Andre and Wally are the last left in the restaurant at closing time. The dynamism of the film lies in the tension between these two poles – the passion of their positions and the abstraction of their dialogue, our ability to identify with them and our dislocation from their rarified position of Upper East Side New York artist/intellectuals – while the pleasures are in the company, the ideas and the intrigue of the conversation itself.

Read the complete essay on the TCM website here.

Delphine Seyrig as exhibit A

The very definition of art cinema, Alain Resnais’ 1960 Last Year at Marienbad defies audience identification, narrative clarity, even any assurance that anything we see is "real" in any sense. Characters without names, played by actors who barely change expression, walk through the lavish but coldly alienating vacation castles reserved for the rich and aristocratic, lost in time and space. One elegantly poised man (Italian actor Giorgio Albertazzi), identified as "X" in the credits," tries to convince a beautiful but impassive woman, "A" (Delphine Seyrig, in a hairstyle as coolly sculpted as the film itself), that they met last year and had an affair and made plans to run away together. She tells him, with a preternaturally restrained sense of calm, that they have never met. It could be a ghost story (the church organ score is appropriately eerie and ominous) in a European castle, the foreign equivalent of the Overlook Hotel. Or it could be film of memory, or perhaps dreams of a wished-for past, filled with flashbacks/memories/stories, but which are themselves full of elisions and gaps and even, at times, contradictory. It’s strange and surreal, full of odd humor and games, the most elaborate of which is the very tale that centers the narrative. Did something happen last year at Marienbad (Friedriksbaad or whatever lavish castle vacation spot was in fashion that year)? Or is it simply an elaborate tale, a seductive promise cutting through the stifling existence of social decorum?

Criterion’s new edition comes out on both DVD and Blu-ray in a superb transfer from a rich fine-grain master print that has been digitally cleaned and fine-tuned, supervised and approved by Alain Resnais. At the director’s insistence, Criterion includes the original, unrestored soundtrack along with the remastered, cleaned-up version. "By correcting so-called flaws, one can lost the style of a film altogether," he writes in the liner notes. Like The Seventh Seal released last week by Criterion, the Blu-ray edition is the a sight to behold and the closest I have come to seeing a beautifully preserved film play on my screen. The image felt alive, like perfectly restored celluloid projected from a well-tempered projector, and pulled me through the image. The DVD also features original half-hour documentary Unraveling the Enigma: The Making of Marienbad, a new, generous 33-minute audio-only interview with Alain Resnais and two early the short documentaries by Resnais: Toute la memoire du Monde and Le Chant du Styrene.

"I lost my memory. I can’t remember anything about the Lebanon war. Just one image." Waltz With Bashir is both art and autobiography from Ari Folman, a filmmaker with a deep interest in psychoanalysis. The memory gap was real ("It’s not stored in my system," he explains) and attempted to reconstruct those missing memories with the help of friends and fellow soldiers. Those conversations on his odyssey back in time and memory (a couple of them reconstructed with actors for the film, the rest recorded with the actual subjects) are the foundation of the script. "The memory is dynamic," explains psychiatrist Ori Sivan. So is Folman’s film, which uses animation not just to illustrate but explore the subjective quality of their remembrances, a mix of mind’s eye first-person observation, dream, fantasy and the exaggeration of emotional memory. Executed in bold lines and slow but fluid movements, it’s never sensationalistic but always striking vivid and immediate. What begins as an introspective odyssey into the effects of war on the young Israeli soldiers turns into a provocative expose on the Sabra and Shatila massacres, events that sent shock waves through the Israeli men who were made inadvertent collaborators. But the final word is not their emotional trauma, but the stark reality of the event itself. The film was nominated for "Best Foreign Language Film" at the 2009 Academy Awards (its absence in the “Best Animated Feature” nominations caused a minor outbreak of outrage). Ari Folman provides commentary (he introduces himself as "writer, producer, director and main protagonist of the film") and a press conference Q&A (in English) and participates in a 12-minute featurette (in Hebrew with English subtitles). Also available on Blu-ray.

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