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!
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