Andre Gregory: Before and After Dinner (2013) User Reviews

Insanity was his father? or was he, or both or neither?

[annuskavdpol · 8/10 · 15 July 2014]

This movie is about serious mental illness, or not? One boy is born into the world and later he wants to understand his past. He never understood his father and called him non-human with no empathy, but how much of that is true? Can a family member rightly judge the symptoms of serious mental illness, or is that the job of a psychiatrist? And are descriptions such as non-human with a lack of empathy symptoms of serious mental illness? Dissociation? A Defense mechanism? Or just an attack on character? Or neither, or both? This movie was semi investigative, into the professional background of the father, who was said to be a Jew and a NS Nazi collaborator, but where was the proof? In the name change over? Or was all of this in the imagination of the boy who believed his father was a Jewish Nazi collaborator. I think the common thread in this is not symptom, nor character flaw, I think the bottomline, is fear. The father probably changed his name on leaving West Europe to be better able to adapt in America. Perhaps to give his son a better life, one void of discrimination and bullying for being different,. The father did not see this movie so it is all conjecture, a one sided story from the son. Not based on facts, nor evidence. This is not a dialogue, like the dialogue between Kafka and his father, which to me would have been a more truthful conversation. My father was born in the starving winter at the tail end of World War II. His parents never disclosed anything about the war. Who were my grandparents psychologically? When I am in Amsterdam, I feel such a deep connect to the past, could I have inherited my grandparents visual memories and emotions, just like it is indicated in Andre Gregory's story. I too thought I was Jewish even though my grandparents on my mothers side are of another religion, and I have followed that other religion. And on my father's side there was zero proof of me being Jewish, but I still thought I was and recently asked my father, and he said no. I said, well, why was the war never talked about? The conversation ended with a glare from my father.