Film

Babette's Feast (1987)

Director: Gabriel Axel

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Why, in the 1870s, would a Parisienne (Audran), an acclaimed chef, be working for a pittance for two elderly sisters supervising a remote religious community on Denmark's windswept Jutland coast? The unlikely answer to that question may be found in Axel's superb adaptation of Isak Dinesen's very funny short story, a bizarre, magical concoction, seasoned to literally mouthwatering effect. The ingredients are marvellous locations, crisp photography, and an excellent cast. Axel never overstates the opposition between the villagers' God-fearing asceticism and Babette's feats of gastronomic wizardry, preferring instead a gently comic portrait of lives defined by pious austerity. It's a tale of self-sacrifice, thwarted ambitions, and lost love, but sheer sensuous joy suffuses the screen when Babette performs her own special miracle for one last supper. Axel, too, is surely an alchemist; compared to most literary adaptations, this is the word made flesh.

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