The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s 13th annual “Rendez-Vous With French Cinema” series may have come to a close Sunday night, but city-dwelling Francophiles can still catch a few more Parisian pictures at the IFC Center, where the late French director Louis Malle (1932–95) has headlined the venue’s “Weekend Classics” series since January.

“There wasn’t any specific reason for doing the series of [Malle] films at this moment, but it did turn out to be serendipitous,” IFC Center’s program director, Harris Dew, said. “For me, Malle is a filmmaker who’s impossible to pigeonhole, and despite that, or maybe even a little because of that, he seems a little overlooked these days. We wanted to present a sampling of Malle’s work to give an idea of its sheer breadth.”

More than most filmmakers, Malle juggled genres and subjects, zigzagging among historical action films, whimsical farces, and epic nonfiction travelogues — not to mention the 1956 underwater documentary “The Silent World,” Malle’s Oscar-winning collaboration with the explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau. The IFC Center series began in earnest in January with “Au Revoir les Enfants,” Malle’s 1987 drama about two boys at a French boarding school during World War II. The film evoked the director’s own childhood experiences during the Nazi occupation of his home country. Having left France midway through his career to work under the umbrella of Hollywood, Malle made his triumphant return to Europe with “Au Revoir.”

This coming weekend’s selection, 1981’s “My Dinner With Andre” (showing Friday through Sunday), stands alongside “Atlantic City” (1980) as the most enduring title from the American chapter of Malle’s career. It exists today not just as the filmmaker’s grandest experiment, but also as one of the most astonishing success stories in the history of independent cinema. Even those who have never seen the film are likely familiar with the title and aware of its most distinguished place in the annals of cinema.

If the movie’s structure — two men sitting around a table, talking for 100 minutes as they eat dinner — seems preposterous, then its back story is equally improbable. In the late 1970s, two New Yorkers, the American writer-actors Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, became convinced that their casual everyday conversations about, among other things, the philosophy of city life, could be made into an interesting play. After they had molded their dialogue into a tightly controlled script, recording several conversations a week for a period of several months, Malle eagerly signed on to develop the project as a movie, bringing with him the vision for a style that would ignite the dialogue with a subtle but essential sense of movement.

Jeff Lipsky, today an independent filmmaker, was the head of distribution at New Yorker Films when the company released “Andre” in New York. At the time, Mr. Lipsky said, he didn’t think much of the movie, and wasn’t surprised when early audiences seemed to share the sentiment.

“The audience reaction at the New York Film Festival, it was probably the single worst audience the film ever had,” Mr. Lipsky said, recalling a festival crowd that all but revolted against the story’s real-time conceit. “It was in the third week of the run — we almost didn’t make it to three weeks — that the movie was first reviewed by Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel on their PBS show. They said it was the best movie of the year. Not the best independent film, but the best picture. Well, that show aired on Sunday, and the next day’s grosses increased 300%.”

What happened next caught Malle and Mr. Lipsky, not to mention Hollywood, by surprise: “My Dinner With Andre” became a long-lasting staple on the New York movie scene, remaining open for business in the city for a full year and spreading to 900 other venues across the country.

“It became a phenomenon that no one could have imagined,” Mr. Lipsky said. “I think it’s one of the last times where you saw something of this magnitude, where an exhibitor takes a substantial risk on something worthwhile and gives a wider audience the time they need to find it and embrace it. But then again, you didn’t have VHS, so people knew they had to go to the theater if they were going to see it.”

In the coming weeks, IFC Center will round out its series of Malle’s films with his stunning 1969 documentary portrait “Calcutta” (showing March 21–23) and his 1990 drama “May Fools” (March 28–30), which tells the story of an insular upper-crust family coping with the death of its matriarch while remaining oblivious to the outside world.

But more than those titles, Messrs. Dew and Lipsky said, there’s something essential about seeing “My Dinner With Andre” on the big screen, something indescribable about how this real-time conversation plays to a crowd that has gathered to consider the subjects being volleyed back and forth at the table in the film.

“I had a studio apartment in Lincoln Plaza when the movie first came out, and it stayed in theaters from October to October,” Mr. Lipsky recalled. “And the spring after it opened, I would find myself watching baseball games on TV, and I knew exactly when the movie started. And just like clockwork, 25 minutes into the film — so after an inning or two — I would often walk down and sneak in the back of the packed theater, and it was just after the movie’s opening tirade that the place would explode with laughter, 300 people going nuts, jumping up and down out of their seats with the first big punch line. It was electric. You can’t get that kind of experience sitting at home, texting people as you watch the DVD.”

ssnyder@nysun.com