Happily, very happily, the story captures fully the wonder, splendor, and splendid benison of the exquisite goodness of the earth, and for this the participants in the meal give abundant thanks. One of Babette’s remarkable accomplishments, as both film and character, is Babette’s feast itself and what it tells of the goodness of the gift of being alive-in this case, pure delight in eating, which for the most part differs from the North American habits of just plain stuffing oneself from boredom or anxiety or fun or whatever ( mea culpa). And it generated an enormous quantity of theological discussion, having, as it does, what is perhaps history’s most remarkable communion feasts, one which is full of wonders, both culinary and religious. A quiet and spare film, entirely lacking in any sort of cinematic “flash,” Babette’s Feast was an international sensation, and additionally, it precipitated a vast western cultural interest in gastronomy, specifically dining or, as we know it now, the foodie movement.
Such is the premise for one of the most remarkable stories in cinema history, based on a 1953 Ladies Home Journal short story by Isak Dinesen, the pen name of Danish writer Karen Blixen (1885-1962), also the author of Out of Africa, a memoir of Blixen’s experience of coffee farming in Africa (a very successful 1985 film version starred Meryl Streep and Robert Redford). Babette (Stephane Audran), though, as she informs them, can cook, and that will help the sisters’ charity work of supplying meals for the poor in the village. The stranger begs to stay, and the sisters overcome their reluctance to take in anyone, given their meager resources. On the proverbial dark and stormy night, a knock on the door reveals a stranger, an attractive middle-aged French woman who begs refuge, presenting a letter of reference from one Achille Papin (Jean-Philippe Lafont), a once-famous opera singer who decades earlier sought the quiet of a remote countryside and fell in love with one of the sisters, who herself sings like a heavenly dove. In a tiny fishing village, consisting almost entirely of a few aging pensioners, live two spinster sisters, Martina (Bergitte Federspiel) and Filippa (Bodil Kjer), named after Luther and Melanchthon by their late father, a leader of a small and now dwindling ascetic pietistic sect of some sort. It is a nameless place where nothing much happens, in part because it is the middle of the 19 th century and also because it seems to lie at the fringe of nowhere, namely somewhere on the seacoast of Danish Jutland. Starring Stéphane Audran, Bodil Kjer, Bergitte Federspiel, Jarl Kulle, and Jean-Philippe Lafont.
Written by Karen Blixen (short story) and Gabriel Axel (screenplay).
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