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Babette's Feast

  • Film
  • 3 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
Babette's Feast.jpg
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Time Out says

3 out of 5 stars

One of the few foreign language films your unadventurous grandmother might enjoy, ‘Babette’s Feast’ is a cosy, appetising but ever-so-slightly complacent period tale from 1987. In remotest 19th-century Denmark, a pair of elderly, benevolent Protestant sisters have, through a series of coincidences, acquired a kindhearted French maid. But when Babette (Stéphane Audran) announces her intention to cook a slap-up French feast for the townsfolk, she comes up against a broad streak of local Puritanism.

Dealing gently but considerately with life, love, loneliness, old age, religion and class, ‘Babette’s Feast’ is a philanthropic, aren’t-people-great sort of film, a celebration of fairness and generosity. But this soft focus extends to the characters who, with the exception of our heroine, are fuzzily sketched and forgettable. This is a pleasant but overgenerous and predictable film, so eager to embrace the good in people that it never fully succeeds as drama.

Written by Tom Huddleston

Release Details

  • Rated:U
  • Release date:Friday 14 December 2012
  • Duration:103 mins

Cast and crew

  • Director:Gabriel Axel
  • Screenwriter:Gabriel Axel
  • Cast:
    • Stéphane Audran
    • Jean-Philipe Lafont
    • Gudmar Wivesson
    • Jarl Kulle
    • Bibi Andersson
    • Bodil Kjer
    • Birgitte Federspiel
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