I like ImagoDei's interpretation of the last lines, though I have this faint feeling I don't really understand what s/he's saying.<br /><br />Which is as of a piece with Andre's conversation, to me, a lot of which went over my head tonight (I saw the movie for the first time just 10 minutes ago) and yet left me terribly moved -- possibly like Wally Shawn's character.<br /><br />The way I took the last lines -- my $.02 -- was merely how I took much of what Andre was saying: not the precise import or meaning of what he said (boy, does he talk fast) but rather the overall tone of dread and the fear of death he evinced. Everything scares him: everything reminds him of the Holocaust, of autopsy and burial, of the prisons we erect to imprison ourselves within, of direct and friendly fascism - in short, of the machines and machinations Western culture and society have emplaced to contain and impeach our fear of death.<br /><br />What I took away from the movie was a sense that these were two highly self-involved individuals (not that I'm condemning self-involvement by any means: it's the American way). Whereas Andre looks more and more outside the realm of the ordinary to find, as Wally describes it, "moments of pure being" that will annihilate or ameliorate his fear of disappearing, Wally retreats more into the quotidian and finds security and comfort in the past memories he finds there. Andre believes in fate, implacability, messages from beyond borne by UFOs; and the last lines of his conversation, I think, reflect his sense that nothing remains, not even the eternal love of a wife, a son.<br /><br />The conversation ends there, at least the conversation between Andre and Wally; but not the movie, nor the conversation between Wally and us. The last last thing I took away from the movie is Wally, splurging on a taxi and looking out at the city of his birth in awe and wonder. He is retreating from Andre and Andre's thanatophilea by removing himself into his past, the past of taxi cabs and buying suits with his (incredibly rich) father (could anyone forget, as I couldn't watching this, that Wallace Shawn is the son of William Shawn, the founder of the New Yorker?); he is being driven away into nostalgia. The very last line of the movie, after all, tells us that Wally will repeat the entire conversation yet again to his girlfriend, of his dinner with Andre.<br /><br />What I'd like to know is what people thought of that waiter. He had a kind of doom and gloom look about him, didn't he? And why did he look at Wally so pointedly?