Conversation is served up, along with apéritifs, soup and pattée;, roast quail entrée, and after-dinner drinks, as a spectator sport rather than as a participatory one. (As spectator sports go, neither conversation nor food consumption is to be ranked among the leaders.) This two-hour tête-à-tête between playwright Wallace Shawn and avant-garde theater director Andre Gregory is not as boring as you might think, if you had not read the critics; it is more boring than you might think, if you had. The spatial restriction to the environs of a restaurant table is a moderately daring cinematic idea, but the idea might have seemed more daring, or anyway more cinematic, had it not been carried out in a manner so overwhelmingly literary. Apart from some of the reaction shots of Shawn, who is truly a funny-looking fellow, and was well exploited for that quality as the "homunculus" in Woody Allen's Manhattan, there is nothing here that would not go over just as well on stage; and you should not be too surprised to learn than an earlier version of the script (co-authored by the two performers) was in fact enacted on the London stage. Directed by Louis Malle. (1981) — Duncan Shepherd
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