BABETTE'S FEAST
A film review by Lons Ponschock
Copyright 1995 Lons Ponschock
A film by Gabriel Axel >From a book by Isak Dinesen Rated G for General Audiences
"Babette says dinner is served."
I eat a lot of junk food. It's part of my current lifestyle. But I've also experienced fine dining and know the joys of it.
BABETTE'S FEAST was the Academy award winner for Best Foreign Film in 1987. It's in Danish and French with subtitles. The only reason I noticed this on the shelf is due to a reference I saw to it on Usenet in a discussion on the currently released Spanish film called LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE.
If you can get past the pieties in the picture (and there are many) you will find that kernel of excellence which makes its 110 minutes all worthwhile. Like the truffle and goose pate' wrapped in a roasted quail, it is a hidden treasure.
In a village in Jutland, Denmark two sisters live with their ministerial father, hence the piety often expressed throughout the film which takes place mostly in 1871. It was a time in which, as the narrator says, "Piety was much in fashion." The sisters befriend a French woman who has escaped the atrocities of her own country. What the sisters don't know is that Babette is one of the premier chefs of Paris.
After fourteen years of service, Babette wins a lottery prize. She then requests to prepare the dinner which will celebrate the memorial to the minister, long deceased.
The film is constructed almost like a meal itself with an appetizer being the love stories of the sisters as young women, the main course and catalyst which is Babette and the resolution which is the dinner itself.
Twelve of the locals who are part of the congregation are invited to this dinner. They are used to dining on such things as something called ale bread: bread soaked in water and a bit of beer then cooked into a gruel. Boy, are *they* in for a surprise. :-)
"...This woman, this head chef had the ability
to transform a dinner into a kind of love
affair... a love affair that made no
distinction between bodily appetite and
spiritual appetite."
Babette, you see, is a great artist. And like any artist she takes this opportunity to do her work. I was reminded in an incongruous manner of another film during BABETTE:
In THE HUSTLER starring Paul Newman from a book by Robert Rosen, the billiard shark Fast Eddie Felsen has fallen on hard times. He's hustling pool in dives on skid row. As he is trolling for fish, he lets his opponent win a few games. The opponent ups the stakes and says just enough about 'luck' to The Hustler to bring out the artist in him. Fast Eddie then delivers one of the great speeches in the film. He tells this skid row joker in effect, 'You know the game. Here's what it's like when it's *great*,' and clears the table of nineball on the break shot.
BABETTE'S FEAST is like that.
I'm sure that they said 'Husker Du' at least once during the film. ;-)
-- lon
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