Some Thoughts on Babette's Feast
I joined a group called the Wednesday Film Club about a year ago. Each season, the members of the group watch movies at home on Wednesday night all connected to a theme. The theme this season is Food, Glorious Food and the film scheduled for tonight, May 17, 2023 is Babette's Feast. I found myself with an interest in the picture and a little bit of free time, so I decided to compile a few informal notes about the picture. Perhaps someone will find them useful.
Babette's Feast is the third movie to have been made from the work of Karen Blixen or Isak Dinesen -- the name she wrote under. The previous two movies were:
The Immortal Story, directed by Orson Welles, and
Out of Africa, directed by Sydney Pollack and starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford.
Out of Africa, released in 1985, won the Oscar for best picture and did well at the box office. According to Box Office Mojo, Out of Africa was the sixth highest grossing movie in the United States that year. In case you are curious, the top ten movies released within the United States in 1985 were:
- Back to the Future
- Beverly Hills Cop
- Rambo: First Blood Part II
- Rocky IV
- Out of Africa
- Cocoon
- Witness
- The Goonies
- Police Academy 2
- Fletch
Babette's Feast, the story, was published in a collection translated into English as Anecdotes of Destiny. The Immortal Story, which Orson Welles made into a movie is also contained in this collection. The book is widely available and I was able to check out an electronic copy from my public library. There is a Canadian website called Faded Page that has a public domain copy of the collection where you can download it in multiple formats.
As can be expected, the story is about Babette's Feast. However, within the story, descriptions of the food are surprisingly sparse. Consider this passage describing a moment after the feast:
Their hearts suddenly filled with gratitude. They realized that none of their guests had said a single word about the food. Indeed, try as they might, they could not themselves remember any of the dishes which had been served. Martine bethought herself of the turtle. It had not appeared at all, and now seemed very vague and far away; it was quite possible that it had been nothing but a nightmare.
Babette sat on the chopping block, surrounded by more black and greasy pots and pans than her mistresses had ever seen in their life. She was as white and as deadly exhausted as on the night when she first appeared and had fainted on their doorstep.
After a long time she looked straight at them and said: “I was once cook at the Café Anglais.”
Martine said again: “They all thought that it was a nice dinner.” And when Babette did not answer a word she added: “We will all remember this evening when you have gone back to Paris, Babette.”
If you are curious about the food, Vice magazine tried to recreate the dinner from the movie, including the turtle soup.
The movie won an Oscar for best foreign film and won an award at the Cannes film festival.
Babette's Feast has many fans. I noticed two among them:
- Alton Brown, best known for his television show Good Eats, lists Babette's Feast among his top ten Criterion movies, ranking it number four. He puts Fellini's 8 1/2 at number one if you were wondering.
- Pope Francis called Babette's Feast his favorite picture.
If you have never seen it and you want an short clip to get you excited about the picture, perhaps one place to start is with a short video from the Criterion Collection called Three Reasons: Babette's Feast. Which, as expected, gives three reasons to watch the picture:
If you stream the movie, then there are two services that you can use. It is available to HBO Max subscribers. And if you have a Criterion Channel subscription, then you can stream it there. It is the same movie in either case, but the Criterion Collection includes five supplemental features:
- An interview with director Gabriel Axel
- An interview with actor Stéphane Audran
- Karen Blixen—Storyteller, a 1995 documentary about the author of the film’s source story, who wrote under the pen name Isak Dinesen
- Table Scraps, a visual essay by filmmaker Michael Almereyda
- An Artist of the Everyday, interview with sociologist Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson about the significance of cuisine in French culture.
If this is your first time seeing Babette's Feast I believe you will enjoy the picture. However, compared to last week's selection, Tampopo, there is considerably less humor in Babette's Feast.
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