This is my third or fourth time sitting down to the table with Babette, and each tasting is more sumptuous and rewarding. After this screening, I realized that Babette deserves a perfect score.

The story is simple, lovely, and gentle. It takes it’s time. It’s this unhurriedness that makes you fall in love, gradually and naturally. The first act is solely dedicated to back story, where we are introduced to the inhabitants of a tiny, picturesque, Danish hamlet. The close knit community revolves around a tiny sect led by a moral and just preacher. His two daughters, Martine and Filippa, are named for Martin Luther and his friend Philipp Melanchton, founders of Protestantism. The fracture with Catholicism being the notion…

While Danish author Karen Blixen's best-known work remains Out of Africa, her short story Babette's Feast, initially published in 1958 as part of a collection entitled Anecdotes of Destiny, is unsurpassed in managing in reaching an intensely human nerve.  

The anthology was the final published work put out during her lifetime, and Gabriel Axel's cinematic adaptation is a comprehensively elegant film. It's punctured with biblical allusions throughout the totality of its screentime and gradually develops into being a symbolic examination of an artist's emotional association to their craft. 

It accounts a stringent ecclesiastical village community on the desolate western coastline of Denmark which welcomes a French refugee from the Franco-Prussian War during the late nineteenth century, as a housekeeper…

I first saw and fell in love with Babette's Feast back in the late 80s shortly after it was released. I had just begun my foray into foreign films and Babette confirmed what would later come to be a truth so ingrained in me that it is the subject of teasing (eh Showbill?): I love foreign films. I don't love them because they are foreign, although sometimes that is enough, when my curiosity about how one lives elsewhere gets the better of me. I love them because of the stories they tell and how they tell them. Even back in the 80s I had come to expect a certain way of telling stories from North American productions, and the more…

Three weeks ago, I introduced this film to 35 freshmen at Seattle Pacific, and tonight I introduce it to a gathering at Saint Ambrose Anglican Church in Seattle.

You know, I often hear this movie summed up as a story about a "worldly" Frenchwoman who becomes a part of a bone-headedly strict religious community, and how she enlightens them.

She does enlighten them, to some extent.

But let's not overlook that Babette fled from a civil war in Paris in which her husband and son were shot — and who had the generosity of heart to take her in, give her refuge, and even give her a place in their home? The pious Christian sisters who preserve that strict, "prudish"…

Babette's Feast is a warm, delicious little film that really has a lot going for it. For one, the way this film looks is kind of unbelievable for the time it came out. Movies didn't look terrible in the 80s, but this one just looks and feels like a period piece that would've come out 20 years later than it actually did. The way everything is shot, the minimal, transcendent dialogue and some quiet but powerful performances make this film stand out from other films around this time.

The first act, for me at least, is a bit disengaging. Theres nothing necessarily wrong with it, but compared to the final act and a touch of the second, its mediocre. The…

The Great Danish Baking Show.

-

[Screened for my Film & Faith class at Seattle Pacific University.]

This brought back fond memories of the time I hosted a screening of this and a post-movie discussion at a packed movie theater in the Netherlands. I wasn't surprised to find a deep love for this film there.

But I was particularly impressed to find, this week, that Axel's film still has the power to move young people to tears — specifically a young Christian man who, sitting in the front row, was clearly rocked by the movie. He actually shook my hand after class, beaming with gratitude. And he talked to me afterward about how much this spoke to him about the ways that…

#7 on Arts & Faith – Top 100 Spiritually Significant Films

If you have never experienced a meal that borders on a religious experience. you owe it to yourself to have one. Food, masterfully prepared, brings us as close to heaven as is possible on Earth. That is at least one of the themes inherent in this wonderful film from Denmark under the direction of Gabriel Axel, who developed the screenplay from a novel by Karen Blixen.

Stéphane Audran plays the title character, Babette Hersant, who arrives upon her exile from Paris in the late 19th century at a tiny town on the coast of Jutland. She ends up working for free as a housemaid and servant to two Puritan sisters,…

Included In Lists:
Great Movies
Criterion Collection - #665
Ladies and Gentlemen: The Essentials -#97

Review In A Nutshell:

Babette's Feast is about the two daughters of a minister, Martine and Filippa, who have taken in a woman, Babette, as requested by an old admirer of one of the sisters. Babette requests the sisters if she could hold a French feast for the 100th anniversary of the minister's birth.

The film's plot is fairly light, lacking in any sense of complication that would make the film seem dire but surprisingly the film has kept me interested as the film succeeds in having the audience care about its characters, fleshing them out early in the film and given enough time to…

someone compared this to a parable (as an insult) but i think thats what makes it so wonderful, delightful, enormous, simple... lessons on art, piety, love, community, God, in a way that was never cloying. the straightforward story telling of the first half perfectly introduced the indulgence of the second half. characters so rich with so little dialogue/plot.

i love this movie and i laughed and cried while watching!

edit: i see ppl say this requires patience but for some reaosn i found the beginning non food parts as wonderful as the others...
my FAVORITE thing about it was the lack of judgement of the puritan lifestyle (maybe a bit of poking fun, but same was directed at swedish army),…