‘Babette’s Feast’ (1987)
Cast: Stephane Audran, Bodil Kjer, Birgitte Federspiel, Jarl Kulle, Jean-Philippe Lafont, Bibi Andersson
Director: Gabriel Axel
Rating: G Running time: 1 hour, 43 minutes
In Danish, Swedish and French with English subtitles
Available for streaming on HBO Max, also available On Demand and on DVD
We’ve come to the end of another holiday season. We’ve survived arguing politics with slightly inebriated relatives around the turkey table, braved the stores and malls that were lined up with snot-nosed children as we scavenged for the perfect gifts, and we’ve tolerated enough Yuletide and tinsel to drive an elf mad.
No matter if you celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or just the Winter Solstice, the days between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve are dominated by consumerism and driven by the almighty dollar as we spend and dole out money for highpriced items just so we can save face among our family and friends.
All semblances of graciousness and goodwill have been zapped and drained from the holiday. Harking back to the “original” meaning of Christmas, it’s a time for giving and compassion toward everybody no matter what race, creed, gender, sexual orientation or how much of an outcast you are. Mary and Joseph could have easily been turned completely away from the inn, but the owner said, “Hey, it’s not much, but I’ve got room in the stables out back.” As cliche as all that stuff is, there’s a reason this story has resonated with people all these years — because it’s genuinely nice. For some reason niceness warms the cockles of any Scrooge’s heart. So, I thought I’d share one of the nicest films that I have ever seen: “Babette’s Feast.”
“Babette’s Feast” is an Academy Award-winning Danish film that came out in 1987. It follows two elderly and pious Protestant sisters, Martine and Filippa (appropriately named after Martin Luther and his companion Philip Melanchthon). The Protestant sisters spend all their time and money taking care of their small coastal community in Jutland. They go door to door delivering ale and bread soup to the sick and bedridden, though their soup looks more like congealed mud as opposed to something edible. Their little lives change one dark and stormy night when a mysterious French woman, dressed ominously in an oversized hooded cape, knocks on their door.
2 SEGMENTS
It’s here where the movie’s plot becomes divided into two segments. The first half looks back upon the past at just exactly how this French lady ends up in this small fishing village. When the sisters were younger, they were visited by two male strangers. One being a man from the Swedish army, Lorens, who is a drunk and a gambler and lacks discipline.
His time with the sisters and their preacher father changes him. He falls in love with one of the sisters, but he realizes that because of their devotion to their father, their romance could never be. He leaves and becomes a well decorated general. The sisters are also visited by a vacationing French musician, Papin, who tries taking one of the sisters under his wing, because of her angelic voice. Papin also finds himself in love, and also leaves just as empty handed as Lorens.
Forty-ish years later, it is explained that the French woman, Babette, has fled the Franco-Prussian War and was instructed by Papin to stay with the sisters, knowing that they’ll take her in. Babette stays with the sisters and becomes their maid for 14 years. Then the second half of the movie starts when Babette wins 10,000 francs in a lottery. She takes her new money, and as a thank you, wants to cater a real French dinner for the sisters and their parishioners. Babette has food shipped in from France — all sorts of fowl, a live sea turtle, and wines and cheeses. We spend the next hour of the film watching her cook and feed these modest villagers an extravagant meal.
Essentially, that’s the movie. The credits roll after the meal is concluded. It’s incredibly simple, with no plot twists or contrivances. It’s so simple in fact, I don’t understand how this movie works, or why, it works so well. In screenwriting there are usually four components that most movies follow to keep their plots and scenes moving forward.
4 ELEMENTS
These are goals, action, conflict and reaction. “Babette’s Feast” has virtually none of these components. Whenever one of these things happens to pop up, the stakes that are offered are so minimal. For example, once Babette starts her cooking, the sisters are taken aback by some of the odd food that’s being prepared. They see the live turtle in the kitchen and they see chicken pot pies with fried chicken heads attached, making it look like it belongs on the menu in a David Lynch-inspired restaurant. This causes the most minuscule of conflicts as the sisters beg the parishioners to not say anything about the weird food in front of Babette.
Lorens even finds his way to the dinner party, and having been a traveler of the world while in the military, is shocked with the quality of each course. He’s stunned by the authentic turtle soup and even more stunned that his fellow diners are acting humbly about consuming such extravagant delicacies. This also adds a bit of good-natured humor as the villagers, unaccustomed to these dishes, study how Lorens eats and follow his lead.
In the end, every scene is resolved by people being nice to each other, which is the antithesis of conflict. Papin and Lorens leave so they wouldn’t force the sisters to choose between love and God, minor squabbling between the parishioners melts away with good food and drink, and a meal that costs exactly 10,000 francs gives a once-renowned chef one last chance to create art inside a kitchen for two modest old women.
Every single character in the movie is selfless, and that’s rare to see in movies. (It’s even rarer to see in real life.) The last time I watched “Babette’s Feast,” it was playing at the Riverdale Cinema as part of the Arkansas Times Film Series. Somewhere halfway through the movie, I started to cry. I felt like the Grinch, as my heart must have grown two sizes that day as I watched these people sacrifice their wants for the good of others only to look back and be content with their decisions.
As we move into this new year, with our tables filled with black-eyed peas and ham, we need to look back at all the good deeds that we’ve accomplished these past 365 days and appreciate them. We need to look forward to the next 365 days, and try to keep this feeling of niceness in our hearts with every decision we make. That way we can have a society that feels stuffed, overindulging on empathy, satiating us, quenching our spirit and soul.