Babette's Feast

The proximity of Thanksgiving Day to the Christmas Season (and Halloween, which is a different kind of feast day) has made the end of the calendar year in the US into a gauntlet of gastronomic overindulgence. Feasting is a tradition reserved for special occasions like the end of Lent or Ramadan, Christmas or the pagan celebration of the Winter solstice that Christmas supplanted. No better film I can think of captures the pure sensual delight of - and the justification for - the feast better than Gabriel Axel's Danish film Babette's Feast. 

Karen Blixen's tale, from her 1958 collection Anecdotes of Destiny, first serialized in the American magazine the Ladies Home Journal, concerns a tiny community of ultra-pious Christians in barren West Jutland who devote every moment of their lives to the study and practical application of Christ's teachings. Their founder, a pastor whom they consider a prophet, has two daughters, Martine and Philippa, whose beauty attracts successively the attention of a young Swedish army officer and a famous French opera tenor. The sisters spurn the advances of both men, who are bitterly disappointed but who will impact their lives many years later. 

The old pastor dies, but his daughters carry on his mission. Fleeing the chaos of Paris Commune in 1871, a Frenchwoman named Babette arrives at the door of Martine and Philippa seeking refuge. She carries with her a letter from Achille Papin, the French tenor, who asks the sisters to take her in. When the sisters tell Babette that they can't afford to employ her, she offers to work for nothing. Gradually, Babette makes improvements on the community's plain diet of bread soup and boiled fish. But the community dwindles and its members grow fractious and argumentative. 

The years pass until a letter arrives informing Babette that her lottery ticket, which a friend had renewed every year, has won her 10,000 francs. The sisters become resigned that Babette will leave them, but Babette tells them that she will cook them a grand dinner on the centenary of their father's birth and sends her nephew to France to buy the ingredients. She returns with crates of cheese and fresh fruit, several live quail chicks and an enormous sea turtle. That night, Martine has a disturbing dream. In the morning she calls together the members of her community and she expresses to them her strong misgivings about the grand dinner that Babette is preparing. The simple sensuous enjoyment of good food is something their faith has taught them to rebuke, along with every other sensuous pleasure. They promise one another that they will not take pleasure from the meal Babette makes for them. 

An unexpected guest is announced, a General Lorens Löwenhielm, who was Martine's suitor thirty years before. While dressing for the feast, in full uniform, the general ponders his long and successful career and wonders if he isn't, indeed, a failure: 

Can the sum of a row of victories in many years and in many countries be a defeat? General Loewenhielm had fulfilled Lieutenant Loewenhielm’s wishes and had more than satisfied his ambitions. It might be held that he had gained the whole world. And it had come to this, that the stately, worldly-wise older man now turned toward the naïve young figure to ask him, gravely, even bitterly, in what he had profited? Somewhere something had been lost. 

A strange kind of transference occurs during the meal in which the worldly General Löwenhielm is so overwhelmed by the sensory delights of Babette's dinner that he is moved to deliver a beautiful sermon and the flock of pious Christians become so intoxicated by the exquisite food and wines that they end the evening in quasi-pagan celebration. 

Gabriel Axel's film was an unexpected joy upon its release in 1987, taking critics and audiences completely by surprise. There is a magisterial balance in the tone of the film. The sisters' extreme piety never becomes tiresome or so absurd that it lapses into comedy. In fact, watching the looks of pleasure alighting on the faces of the congregants during the feast is a climax in itself: 

The boy once more filled the glasses. This time the Brothers and Sisters knew that what they were given to drink was not wine, for it sparkled. It must be some kind of lemonade. The lemonade agreed with their exalted state of mind and seemed to lift them off the ground, into a higher and purer sphere. 

Babette's Feast is as close to perfection as a film is likely ever to get. One of the things about it that has never been properly praised is its precision. The first half of the film feels like sheer exposition, moving the story along, until the second half unreels, folding the story back on itself and confirming every promise that it made. Stage by stage the tale proceeds, making points that have unerring bearing on the final revelation, spoken by General Löwenhielm: 

‘We tremble before making our choice in life, and after having made it again tremble in fear of having chosen wrong. But the moment comes when our eyes are opened, and we see and realize that grace is infinite. Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude. Grace, brothers, makes no conditions and singles out none of us in particular; grace takes us all to its bosom and proclaims general amnesty. See! that which we have chosen is given us, and that which we have refused is, also and at the same time, granted us. Ay, that which we have rejected is poured upon us abundantly. For mercy and truth have met together, and righteousness and bliss have kissed one another!’ 

There are several familiar faces in the cast, including the Danish actors Birgitte Federspiel, Lisbeth Movin, and Preben Lerdorff Rye, veterans of Carl Theodor Dreyer films, and the Swedish actors Jarl Kulle and Bibi Andersson, favorites of Ingmar Bergman. I especially loved Jean-Philippe Lafont as Achille Papin, a genuine operatic tenor whose outsized character is almost transcendent in the village in Denmark where he finds - and loses - the beautiful Philippa. But above all the other actors is the accomplished Stephane Audran as Babette, who loses everything in France only to find her true vocation with two Christian sisters in Jutland. 

What the film tells us is that, no matter how strictly our lives are hemmed in, no matter how life-denying it may be or how joyless, a single day of sensuous indulgence is permissible - if only to clarify our resistance to the forces that conspire to destroy us. 

Happy Thanksgiving!

The Quiet Girl

‘You don’t ever have to say anything,’ he says. ‘Always remember that as a thing you need never do. Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.’ 

The beautiful film (I almost want to pronounce it "filum" like the Irish are wont) The Quiet Girl, that was made by Colm Bairéad from Claire Keegan's short novel Foster suffers from the same affliction endured by most film adaptations of finer literary works. It enlarges the most intimate dimensions of the book, told from the perspective of Cáit, a 9-year-old girl, like it feels obliged to open everything up for the Big Screen so everyone can see it in all its tiniest details. Technically, it's a kind of showing off - one medium exulting in externals in the same way another medium exults on the internals. But there is also a misplaced need to always explain, to make explicit what is implicit. Too many filmmakers are afraid that some viewers who are less attentive won't get whatever they're getting at. They need to get over this fear. 

The little book, published as a stand alone novella, has reminded some critics of Chekhov, who also avoided the longer form. Published in 2010 but set in Counties Wexford and Wicklow in 1981, Foster is a remarkably sweet and delicate story of a girl sent by her mother to live for a summer with a couple that has no child so that the mother can get on with bearing her sixth child. The summer becomes such a respite in the girl's life that she (quietly) dreads having to leave and go back to a houseful that overwhelmed her before and is likely to be worse with the addition of one more. 

The film, shot in County Meath, quickly establishes Cáit's isolation within her large family. We first see her lying in a meadow as voices call out to her. When we notice her lying there, obscured by the bushes, her stillness and the voices calling her name are a little alarming. She gets up and goes back to the house. Her family isn't exactly poor - they live in a two-storey farmhouse. But her parents don't appear to be up to the challenges of their life. Cáit's father is younger than he seemed in the story, and also much cruder. He drinks, chain smokes and dallies with other women. The mother is reduced to a baby-making drudge. 

The little cruelties that children in large families endure don't have to be shown to us. We each have an innate sense of them, almost beyond memory. Cáit's family is never overtly abusive. When she hides under her bed rather than face her mother's reaction to her having wet the bed the night before, her mother, knowing she's there, sourly tells her she has "muck" on her shoes. Clearly, the worst she has to endure from her family, as the youngest of four daughters, is total neglect. 

The foster couple she is sent to live with, Sean and Evelyn Kinsella, are materially better off than the girl's family, but not by much. The difference is that their house seems so much larger and finer with just the two of them. Sean runs a dairy farm, and though Cáit isn't required to work, she helps Sean with the sweeping and learns how to feed the calves from a bottle, since the cows' milk is for sale. 

Immediately upon her father's departure, without so much as a goodbye hug (and driving off with her suitcase), Cáit is given the most luxurious bath of her life by Evelyn, all the way down to scrubbing her toes. Evelyn tells her there are no secrets in the house, but she neglects to tell her that they had a son who chased the dog into a slurry pit and drowned. Cáit doesn't learn about it until a nosy neighbor woman tells her. 

The Quiet Girl is Irish in more than just its setting. The spoken language is almost all Irish, an ancient Gaelic language. And the dialogue occasionally switches to English words at the oddest moments. Interestingly, Cáit's father is the only character in the film to speak exclusively in English, which further isolates him from everyone around him. 

It's a very quiet film, using Stephen Rennicks's music so sparingly it's almost unnoticeable - which, I have found, is the best film music. I can't honestly tell if the wondrous quality of the cinematography, by Kate McCullough, is due to the beauty of the country or not. But it doesn't matter. There are three principal actors, Carrie Crowley as Evelyn Kinsella, Andrew Bennett as Sean, and a newcomer, Catherine Clinch as Cáit. Clinch is never called upon to act, but she manages to suggest with her deep blue eyes alone such a range of reactions, and always so subtly, that it draws the viewer closer to her and into the world in which she breathes. 

When, sadly, Cáit must return to her home and get ready for the new school year, the Kinsellas are left childless as before. The only benefit is Caít's experience of genuine familial love. The film’s final scene is overwhelmingly beautiful. 

There are missteps. When the girl runs to the mailbox and back and in the closing scene, the film switches to slow-motion. It's a common enough device. In this case I would guess it's the filmmaker's way of italicizing the moment, stretching time to make the moment last. In Claire Keegan's story, the girl says, 

My heart does not so much feel that it is in my chest as in my hands, and that I am carrying it along swiftly, as though I have become the messenger for what is going on inside of me. 

But the switch is jarring in The Quiet Girl, knocking us into the unreal. Not as egregious as the moment Forrest Gump starts to run, kicking off his leg braces. But that was a bad movie, and this is a good one.* 

*I can't condemn the use of slow motion entirely. A friend reminded me of Sam Peckinpah's use of slow motion, which was often fascinating. So there is a creative way to use the special effect.

All Quiet On the Western Front (2022)

What more is there to be said about war that Griffith and Gance and Eisenstein and Vidor and Renoir and Kurosawa and Kubrick and all the rest haven't said already? A new adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's classic pacifist novel All Quiet on the Western Front* is available streaming on Netflix. It covers a lot of old ground but fails to cover it creatively or memorably. 

World War I wasn't the first war of attrition - a war that was little more than the systematic slaughter of millions of people, mostly German men, Frenchmen and Englishmen - but it was a demarcation dividing one age from another. According to the Encyclopedia Brittanica, "some 8,500,000 soldiers died as a result of wounds and/or disease," in a war that lasted a little more than four years. But the Great War has also had an extraordinary afterlife. Veterans of the war - poets, playwrights, novelists, and filmmakers, as well as memoirists - took their combat experience as their subject and created works of art that have fixed the war in our collective consciousness. The tone of nearly all Great War literature was pacifist and anti-war. 

According to Andrew Kelly, whose book Cinema and the Great War I recommend, Lewis Milestone's movie adaptation of All Quiet of is "The measure for all anti-war cinema." But it's a very tricky term, "anti-war cinema." As I mentioned before, battle scenes have occupied the creative resources of some of the greatest filmmakers, quite understandably because of their extreme visual impact. Shots of dozens, sometimes hundreds of people doing violence to one another are unlikely to leave any viewer feeling ambivalent about them. Film is a kinetic art - hence the word cinema. Our eyes are attracted irresistibly to movement. And what could possibly be more kinetic in a film than a battle scene? 

The trouble with battle scenes for the filmmaker is precisely their ability to thrill. Even when, as in Apocalypse Now, a filmmaker tries to show that war is of its nature insane, he often succumbs to the spectacular qualities of combat. If one were to ask viewers of Apocalypse Now to name their favorite scene, I doubt that many would fail to name the famous morning helicopter raid, with speakers on board the helicopters blasting Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" and a deranged Colonel telling us how the napalm smells like victory. 

50 years after the event, Philip Larkin could write in his poem "MCMXIV": 

Never such innocence, 

Never before or since, 

As changed itself to past 

Without a word—the men 

Leaving the gardens tidy, 

The thousands of marriages 

Lasting a little while longer: 

Never such innocence again. 

I haven't read Remarque's novel, which Goebbels banned, prompting Remarque to seek refuge first in Switzerland and then in America, but I've now seen three movie adaptations of it: Lewis Milestone's 1930 version, with its extraordinary photography by Arthur Edeson, the 1979 version, made for television, directed by Delbert Mann, and now a German-language version directed by Edward Berger. Of the three, Milestone's is the best, probably because it was made only 12 years after the war ended and the world's attitude toward war hadn't yet been overwhelmed by the Nazis. 

Early in the new film, after the viewer has already been introduced to the trenches (I almost used the adjective "hellish," but the word seems clichéd), a group of the latest cannon fodder leaves school in cheers, enlists in the Army and marches off, just as Larkin wrote, "Grinning as if it were all/An August Bank Holiday lark". We are shown in explicit detail how the uniforms they are marching in were recycled from the bodies of soldiers killed in action: the blood rinsed away, the bullet holes sewn shut. 

Fed the same bullshit nationalism that a generation of French and English armies had been, the enthusiasm with which this group of young German men enlist in the army and march off to war is not even allowed its irony - Edward Berger underscores these scenes with disturbing noises - not music - throughout. We all know by now what they're headed for. After lengthy scenes of trench warfare carnage, an extended lull behind the lines muddles the film’s pacing. There is one scene I must single out in which Paul and his friend Kat (Albrecht Schuch) open letters from home while sitting bare-arsed using an improvised latrine. Paul is the central character, played by as unprepossessing an actor - Felix Kamerer - as could be found on either side of the front. I suppose he was cast because of his sheer averageness (I couldn't avoid being reminded of a younger Karl Malden). 

Two years ago on this day I reviewed the Sam Mendes film 1917. All Quiet begins the same year, on the German side of the lines. Kudos (I guess) to the movie's makeup department for showing us what the corpses of combat casualties look like in living - livid - color. The cinematography is by James Friend, a Brit, and it's often beautiful despite the ghastliness of so much of his subjects. 1.78:1 is the aspect ratio and it sometimes seems even wider, but the film exploits it far too much. What was needed wasn't the panoramic but the claustrophobic. I don't think even David Lean would've tried for epic moments given such a subject. The best scene in the film isolates Paul and a French soldier in a huge bomb crater. Paul mortally stabs the Frenchman several times but must then witness his protracted death. Paul draws his knife to cut open the soldier's tunic and calms him by repeating the word "Kamarad!" Helplessly, he tries to close the wounds and stop the blood from flowing from the Frenchman's mouth. After he dies, he tells the dead man he's sorry and he finds a photo of a woman and child in his pockets and a packet of letters. I can't say that this and other scenes, like the final scene of Paul's own death, are unmoving. They are all just short of veritable. 

Finally, the people who adapted Remarque's novel committed a curious and serious error by chosing to introduce non-fictional scenes involving Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl) and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Remarque's novel was narrated by Paul, and he tells the story simply and honestly. His narrative is cut short at the end by a matter-of-fact report of his death and the words announced by wire services at the 11th hour on November 11, 1918: Im Westen nichts Neues - All Quiet on the Western Front. 

I can find no pressing need for this film, at this time. The only good reason I can think of for why it was made is neglect. Either no one has seen Lewis Milestone's 1930 version or they don't want to see it. After all, it's a grey movie with photographic qualities that are no longer appreciated when CGI can do it so much more easily - and the mayhem is more "graphic." Paul Fussell's great book The Great War and Modern Memory may have to be renamed The Great War and Modern Amnesia. Is it possible today to communicate the message of Remarque's novel to the people it was intended to reach? The people - like Putin and Xi - who aren't convinced of the futility of war? 

*first published 96 years ago yesterday.

One Way Ticket

He disappeared in the dead of winter: 

The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted, 

And snow disfigured the public statues; 

The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.

What instruments we have agree 

The day of his death was a dark cold day. 

W. H. Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" 

On the afternoon of November 7, 2007 - yesterday - I departed Anchorage, Alaska on a Northwest flight to Manila, arriving on November 8 - today - some time around noon. 15 years have passed. I can't let this day go by without apostrophizing it. 

On that day my sister drove me to the airport across a town already locked in ice and the sky was overcast. The road that goes past the two terminal buildings was one-way, and we missed the Northwest Airlines entrance and had to go all the way back around to find it. I lost my temper at my sister because travel makes me so anxious that I can't relax until I'm checked in, sitting near my gate and awaiting boarding instructions. I didn't think what that drive meant to my sister and how it would affect her. I didn't think about what her long drive home without me must have been like, to an empty house (except for Lucky, her dog) on Caress Circle, where I had been living with her for nearly two years. Within months she would lose the house to Wells Fargo's foreclosure. And my dear sister would never see me again. She died of heart failure on October 27, 2016. It had to be heart failure, didn't it? 

As soon as I was checked in, I made my way to the airport lounge and ordered a drink. All my attention was fixed on what lay ahead of me. I had been planning the trip, my sixth trip to the Philippines, since 2005. I had told my sister about it from the beginning, from when I moved in with her just before Christmas in 2005. I had a small disability pension from the VA, which had been eating at my consciousness ever since I started drawing it. The thought of quitting my job and going to live on my pension in a poor country was utterly tantalizing. As I told my sister, I hadn't given up on life just yet. She assured me that she hadn't, either.

If I could change one thing, I would never have got on that plane. I was 49 then and I'm now 64. In a few months I'll be flying back to the States - not to Anchorage but to the other side of the country, Maine. This time I won't be coming back. The fascination that this place had for me when I visited in 1993 and on five subsequent occasions over the years is long gone. 

Bye bye, PI.

The Rising Shadow

Les Podewell

Very deep inside the Harold Ramis movie Groundhog Day, an old idea is given somewhat chilling validation: the day of your death is inscribed in every cell in your body, in your tissues, and there is no way to escape it. You may see it coming, and be granted a little time to put your house in order. But when the time comes, your time, the show is over. 

Some argue that we should live every day as if it were our last day. But aside from being a little silly, it would also be acutely difficult. If you knew you were going to die on a certain day, you would naturally make preparations, like updating your will or settling debts or even gathering your loved ones around you. In other words, if there were literally no tomorrows to anticipate, your sense of purpose would be focussed on nothing but getting you to the end. Enzo Ferrari once said the ideal formula one race car would fall apart the moment it crossed the finish line. It's purpose only as finite as the checkered flag, it should disintegrate when the race was over. Or, as Saul Bloom (Carl Reiner) put it in Oceans Twelve : "I want the last check I write to bounce!" 

In the movie Groundhog Day, after a certain number of reiterations (and we never know how many there have been), Phil Conners comes to something like this same realization - that it ultimately doesn't matter whether he plays by the rules or doesn't, whether he finishes the day in his bed or behind bars or even on a slab in the morgue. The clock will be rewound and he will wake at 6 o'clock in the morning - the same morning - fully intact. So Phil never has to worry about saving his own skin, since there are no consequences for him. 

But among the many citizens of Punxsutawney whom Phil encounters in his daily repetitions is a beggar identified in the credits simply as "Old Man" and played by a veteran American actor named Les Podewell. He appears in six scenes in the film - the first five standing in the same place, a street corner, at the precise moment, or thereabouts, when Phil passes by on his way to Gobbler's Knob. The beggar does the same thing every time - he holds out his right hand for whatever change Phil can spare. On the first encounter, Phil pats himself down as if looking for his wallet. The beggar looks hopeful, but Phil walks right on by. The second encounter, when Phil is slowly coming around to the fact that something strange is happening to him, and he pats himself down for a second time, revealing that it's his standard routine when confronted by a panhandler, you can see the déjà vu on his face when he looks at the beggar. On the third encounter, when Phil is alarmed at the seeming nightmare he's in, he jumps in fear when he sees the beggar standing in the same spot on the corner. On the fourth day, Phil sarcastically tells him, "Catch you tomorrow, Pop," sure in his belief that there is no tomorrow and he can use the same line with impunity the next time. 

Forty minutes of the movie elapses before Phil meets the old man again, but by then, after spending innumerable Groundhog Days trying to get Rita into bed, all in vain, Phil is a different man. He looks at the beggar, reaches into his pocket, takes out a wad of cash and, after beginning to count it, places all of it in the beggar's hand and walks away. The old man looks in amazement at the money in his hand. Later that night, walking past an alley, Phil sees the old man struggling along a brick wall. He goes to him and says, "Hello father. Let's get you someplace warm." The old man smiles at him and Phil says, "Remember me?" 

Cut to Phil standing in a hospital waiting room. A nurse approaches him. "Are you the one who brought the old man in?" "How is he?" Phil asks. "Well, he just passed away," the nurse tells him. "What did he die of?" "He was just old. It was just his time." Phil asks to see his chart, enters the room where the old man expired and throws back the curtain. The nurse tells him, "Sometimes people just die." "Not today," Phil tells her. 

In the following scene, on the following Groundhog Day, Phil and the old man are sitting in a diner. When the old man finishes a bowl of chicken soup, Phil pushes another in front of him. "Gets hard down there on the bottom," Phil tells him. The old man smiles at him and even more food arrives. Late in his life Les Podewell was afflicted with rheumatoid arthritis, and we see his gnarled fingers, making his hands into claws. (see photo)(1) 

The following shot takes place in an alley. The old man is lying on the ground and Phil is trying desperately to revive him. "Come on, Pops, breathe!" he pleads. Phil breathes into his mouth but the air escapes as steam in the cold night air. Phil looks up at the sky in a mute appeal. As Phil learns, the old man always dies, no matter what he does to save him. But he can't save him. This scene is the real catalyst in the movie, the moment when Phil realizes what's happening to him and what he needs to do to turn it - his life - around. It's his encounter with death - implacable, inescapable, and final. This idea isn't a new one. Simply put, your death in inscribed in every cell of your body, like an expiration date, and there is nothing you - or anyone else - can do to change it, delay it, or postpone it. Witnessing the old beggar's death affects Phil deeply, and it's the catalyst for all his subsequent actions. The wonder of the film is that, no matter what he does, whether he's a good man or a bad man, Phil has to keep doing it over and over until he gets it exactly right. He is given no indication that being a loving human being will release him from the curse - if it is a curse. But he does it anyway. 

A cottage industry has grown up around Groundhog Day trying to estimate the number of days that Phil had to repeat. Harold Ramis, who co-wrote and directed the movie, estimated that Phil had to endure 10 years of repeated Groundhog Days in order to master the piano, ice sculpting, and become a loving human being. 

Ramis shows us the old man's dying in the alley only once, but there were others. There is a "deleted scene" from Groundhog Day that is available on YouTube. Because of time limits, and in the interests of the narrative flow, but mostly because he was making a comedy, Harold Ramis decided to cut the scene. But after Phil watches the old man die in the alley, does he just leave him there? In the deleted scene, Phil puts a blanket over the body, looks at his face for one long moment, and then he walks away - just before an ambulance enters the alley. Two EMTs get out and go over to the old man. One of them recognizes him as "Old Jesse." While one of them examines the body, the other finds a note in his pocket and reads it aloud: 

Every night by cold bricks' glow 

I watch the shadow rising 

from this old man in the snow 

At 8:02 he let it go. 

The other EMT pronounces Old Jesse dead. 

Phil was with the old man in his last moments - because he had no one else - for an undetermined number of nights, providing Old Jesse with companionship and comfort until the very end. It's an extraordinary act of compassion from a once selfish and cynical weatherman on his day by day road to redemption. 

(1) At his funeral service in Chicago in 1998, Podewell was eulogized by Studs Terkel.