Warning: This movie might give you a craving for turtle soup!
At this year’s Oscars, the Danish A Royal Affair did not win the Best Foreign Language Film award, but let’s turn back time a quarter of a century, to 1988; a year in which a Danish movie did win this award. Gabriel Axel’s Babette’s Feast is just now out on DVD and Blu-ray, and it is based on a 1950 short story by Denmark’s perhaps most famous author, Karen Blixen (b.1885, d.1962), whose best known work in the Anglophone world is the autobiographical Out of Africa (published 1937; adapted into an English-language movie starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford in 1985). Both Out of Africa and Babette’s Feast were originally written in English, under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen, and then translated into her native Danish by the author on a later occasion.
Gabriel Axel had been trying for ten years to find somebody to produce and finance Babette’s Feast as a movie, and he only succeeded after Sydney Pollack’s Out of Africa won an astounding 7 Oscars at the Academy Awards in 1986, including the statuettes for Best Movie and Best Director.
In Babette’s Feast, the story, which runs from about 1840 to 1885, takes place in a tiny religious community in Jutland, on the west coast of the North Sea (which is known in Denmark as the Western Sea, just as the Baltic Sea in Danish is the Eastern Sea). Here, a small congregation is centered around the local priest and prophet, whose two devoted daughters, Martine and Filippa, are famed far and wide for their beauty. Suitors come to ask for their hand, but their father always gently refuses. The daughters, too, as so pious that they never consider marriage. Their lives are filled with church-going and charity work for the local poor, which mainly consists in cooking them vegetable soup.
Over the years, Martine and Filippa each have one special suitor who stands out among the rest. One of them is doted on by a French opera singer, Achille Papin, who, while on vacation, hears her sing in the church, and is so taken with her voice that he insists on giving her singing lessons, to prepare her for an international singing career. But as his advances grow more amorous, he ends up being rejected, and has to leave. The other sister is courted by a Swedish army officer, Lorens Löwenhielm, who, on seeing that his suit will not be fruitful, decides to devote himself to his army career.
Years pass, the father dies, and one day in 1871, a wretched lady knocks on the sisters’ door. This is Babette, a fugitive from the Paris Commune, who has been sent here by Achille Papin, who remembered the kindness of this Danish family. Babette finds a place as a maid-servant with the sisters, and improves on the vegetable soup given to the local poor. Fourteen years then pass, and the 100th anniversary of the birth of the sisters’ father rolls around. They invite their friends to a humble dinner – the only kind they ever give – but Babette implores them for permission to cook a magnificent feast that she will even pay for with her own money. The pious sisters, and the rest of their congregation, think that this is tantamount to tempting the devil, but they allow it for Babette’s sake.
As fate will have it, none other than the ageing Lorens Löwenhielm, now a general, arrives to attend the anniversary dinner, and is profoundly moved by the sumptious feast, which is so like one he once had at a famous café in Paris… The congregation, too, which had been growing steadily more grumpy and quarrelsome, have their tongues loosened by the flowing wine, and end up settling old scores amicably.
It is a touching and pristinely wrought tale of how a lifestyle of simple austerity is injected with a taste – or a burst – of color and sensuality through the mind-reeling excesses of French cuisine, and how a French lady leaves little traces of joyous sophistication among a tiny and strict Nordic Protestant community, with enough modesty and patience that, while they are a bit suspicious about her, they do not reject her.
The new disc, released in the UK on February 25, contains two trailers and a new short interview with star Stéphane Audran. It is in Danish (plus bits in French) with English subtitles.
Director: Gabriel Axel
Cast: Ghita Nørby (narrator), Stéphane Audran, Bodil Kjer, Birgitte Federspiel, Jarl Kulle, Jean-Philippe Lafont, Axel Strøbye and others.
Runtime: 102 min.
Country: Denmark
Film Rating: 
