Andre Gregory

Andre Gregory Doc

Interesting.

The movement stuff, the laughter, the all that is great. The movements of the inspired body, the expressive body, the grotowski essence. The humor of it, and of Andre, was wonderful.

There was a whole holistic pleasure to the movie, and to Andre Gregory. As more often has it, though, it is the hooks and snags that I remember the next day.

I had a similar envious reaction as I did to Dinner, specifically about the invisibility of money in Andre's description of his life (and at the high class restaurant they attend, where the movie makes Andre's knowledge of french cuisine one of his gestures of aristocracy and superiority to Wallace Shawn, which the whole movie rides on in a sense). Money is never an issue; then there's the telling episode of one of Gregory's theater mates from the seventies describing how scary Gregory's father was - as the theater mate was collecting a periodic check from him to support the theater. Gregory wouldn't go himself, but we send his friends to pick up money from his dad. And the production he was directing, Alice, was, as the interviews would cast it, in his own words, an analysis on his father's authoritarianism.

Another strange moment: Andre describes his audition for Martin Scorsese for the part of John the Baptist in exuberant, wild terms - that he acted the shaman, got necked and danced, and Martin took a video. The doc then shows the video - which shows nothing more than Gregory in a button-down shirt, reclining on a couch, reading lines from a book.

This disjunction between story and fact is perhaps nothing serious - Gregory is just a good raconteur, improving the stories of his life. But it left a little spoiled taste with me because of the way it illuminates how he projects himself, as he wants to be seen, which is (which is another strand of the documentary) as a shaman. I want to not let a trifle like what really happened get in the way of making a more interesting experience, but - some honesty is broken. Some trust. Andre Gregory, for all his virtues, is a man who likes to control an exciting image for how people view him, and that, in conjunction with the hagiographic My Dinner and this documentary, leaves me cold, despite the incredible content of his ideas and life. The difference between just being something and wanting to be seen as being something.

Oh, and the difference between young and old Andre! That was fascinating. Old man, laughs a lot, talks a lot - similar to his appearance in My Dinner. But young Andre, in interviews: angry, intense, sexy unbuttoned shirt. Angry at culture, angry at his parents, confident and, in his direction, in his attacks, seemingly single-minded. That is, too me, the worst kind of character. I like his older self, but that creator and revolutionary who is obsessed, whose identity is built on the negative and dissenting relationship to another, or to power - well.

 Seems pretty cool.