Babette's Feast: Julian Baggini savours the ultimate lockdown movie
At a time when basic grocery shopping is a military operation and many people’s incomes have been cut, an invitation to watch others eat a sevencourse meal including caviar, foie gras and truffles might seem a bit rich, in more than one sense of the word. However, despite the incongruous luxuriousness of its eponymous climatic meal, Gabriel Axel’s 1987 masterpiece Babette’s Feast is the ideal lockdown movie.
Most of the film shows how the puritanical Danish Lutherans in the film lived before they sat down to turtle soup, blinis and quail in puff pastry. Life for them is a lot more austere than it is for most of us now. Many depend on the local equivalent of food banks: the meal delivery service provided by the two devout sisters Martine and Filippa.
Pasta, tinned meat and UHT milk is manna from heaven compared with the stale bread porridge they gratefully wolf down.
But it is not just poverty that stops the villagers enjoying their food. The sisters also eat the unappetising gruel. For them the tongue is a “strange little muscle” that has “unleashed evil and deadly poison”. The prospect of the feast fills the puritans with the fear of temptation. Their strategy to avoid falling into sin is to eat “as if we never had the sense of taste”. These are hardly the ideal diners for a woman who was once the acclaimed chef at the highclass Café Anglais.
But when Babette takes on the role of the sisters’ cook and housekeeper, seeking sanctuary from the fall of the Paris commune in 1871, she does so without complaint, not letting on about her prior life. Because she understands and appreciates food, she is able to make the meals more enjoyable and more nutritious while actually decreasing the sisters’ grocery bill. Despite the limited ingredients available, she selects them carefully, foraging for wild herbs and plants and cooking with supreme skill. The faces of the poor who receive her meals are no longer merely grateful but filled with joy. Shafts of light warm their gloomy world every
day.
Babette has a lot in common with the ideal tenzo (Zen cook), as described by the 13th-century Japanese Buddhist Dōgen. He said that the tenzo should never complain about what ingredients are available and “always handle everything with the greatest care and attention”. With the right attitude, a cook can “build great temples from ordinary greens”.
Babette brings pleasure to this corner of Jutland, but it is not a shallow hedonism. She is a very serious woman who rarely smiles. For her cooking is an art, and pleasure or happiness are not its ultimate goals. Rather, quoting the great French opera singer Achille Papin, she says: “The long cry from the heart of the artist is, ‘Give me a chance to do my very best’”.
Of course, there is a lot of pleasure to be had in the eating. But it is not that of the insatiable glutton who is always left unsatisfied. At the feast, the guest who is most used to fine dining, General Löwenhielm, eats with mindful attention, observing the wonders in the food that the less tutored miss.
There is a bittersweet feeling to the meal. As Stéphane Audran, the actor who plays Babette says: “At the end there is a miracle.” This miracle occurs in time and passes. To really appreciate the joy of food you have to embrace its transience, to accept it will pass and to savour without clinging. When we relate to the wonder of the world in this way we give mortal life a kind of reverence that might even been called religious.
The film shows us how lockdown and restrictions on what we can eat are opportunities to appreciate the value of food even more. When we care about what we eat and pay more attention to it, we can achieve more with less. When we are uncomfortably aware of how lives are being taken by this wretched virus, we treasure even more the simple daily pleasures that make life worth living. And although the conviviality of the table remains almost impossible to share, helping to feed those who don’t have enough, and to feed them well, is arguably an even more important way for the love of food to connect us with the love of life and humanity.
Julian Baggini’s Babette’s Feast is published by Bloomsbury as part of the BFI’s Film Classics Series.