Babette's Feast
From AwardAnnals
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| Director(s) | Gabriel Axel |
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| Distributor | MGM (Video & DVD) |
| Honors | |
| Some movies can only be described as delicious. In Babette’s Feast, a woman flees the French civil war and lands in a small seacoast village in Denmark, where she comes to work for two spinsters, devout daughters of a puritan minister. After many years, Babette unexpectedly wins a lottery, and decides to create a real French dinner—which leads the sisters to fear for their souls. Joining them for the meal will be a Danish general who, as a young soldier, courted one of the sisters, but she turned him away because of her religion. The village elders all… | |
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
Some movies can only be described as delicious. In Babette’s Feast, a woman flees the French civil war and lands in a small seacoast village in Denmark, where she comes to work for two spinsters, devout daughters of a puritan minister. After many years, Babette unexpectedly wins a lottery, and decides to create a real French dinner—which leads the sisters to fear for their souls. Joining them for the meal will be a Danish general who, as a young soldier, courted one of the sisters, but she turned him away because of her religion. The village elders all resolve not to enjoy the meal, but can their moral fiber resist the sensual pleasure of Babette’s cooking? Babette’s Feast deservedly won the 1987 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. This lovely movie is impeccably simple, yet its slender narrative contains a wealth of humor, melancholy, and hope. —Bret Fetzer
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Released in 1987, Babette’s Feast is a film which depicts so little, yet says so much. Set in a rural Danish community, it centres around the twin sisters of the village pastor and the French women who serves them after fleeing the 1871 revolution. On winning the lottery she plans a feast to mark the centenary of the sisters’ father, bringing a dimension of fine living into the lives of the God-fearing Lutherans and healing festering personal animosities in the process.
Director Gabriel Axel captures the rugged timelessness of the Jutland landscape, and draws inspired performances from Stéphane Audran as Babette, and Bodil Keyer and Birgitte Federspiel as the sisters Filippa and Martine. Per Norgard’s sparse but affecting score captures the mood of the film perfectly. Altogether it’s a heart-warming and affecting experience. —Richard Whitehouse
Barnes and Noble
An entrancingly bittersweet and comedic blend of austerity and opulence, Babette’s Feast—which won the 1987 Oscar for Best Foreign Film—is a delightful combination of the talents of Danish director Gabriel Axel and the luminous French actress Stéphane Audran. Set on the bleak Jutland Peninsula in the 1870s, the film revolves around two spinster sisters (Bodil Kjer and Brigitte Federspiel) who maintain the strict religious philosophy of their late father, and Babette (Audran), a Parisian refugee who turns up on their doorstep seeking refuge and becomes their cook and housekeeper. Fourteen years elapse before it is revealed that Babette is a cordon bleu cook—a fact that leads to a cathartic event for her, her employers, and the community. This superb adaptation of an Isak Dinesen novella remains true to its literary source, and Axel’s cinematic flourishes (particularly the deftly deployed flashbacks) are as exquisitely delicious as the titular repast itself. Subtle, warm, and altogether engaging, Babette’s Feast is a film about missed chances that is not to be missed. Ed Hulse
