Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 7-May-06
Spoiler Rating: Medium

Babette's Feast (1987)

For some reason I wanted to like "Babette's Feast" more than I did. I mean, I've enjoyed food flicks before and was pretty well hooked when this one set out to explain how Danish spinsters in a seaside village acquired an unlikely French maid. But my interest slowly faded as "Babette's Feast" progressed from soup to nuts. Gabriel Axel's adaptation of Karen Blixen's story is more like a conceptual snack than a full-fledged meal, and as such isn't adequately filling.

The slender tale revolves around two daughters of a Protestant minister in the mid-1800s. Devoted entirely to their father, along with a small flock of followers, the girls reject worldly pursuits and maintain a lifelong rigidity of purpose. When young, Martina (Vibeke Hastrup) sidesteps the attentions of a dashing officer (Gudmar Wivesson), while Philippa (Hanne Stensgaard) walks away from the chance to become an opera star. When old (and played by Birgitte Federspiel and Bodil Kjer), the sisters take in a Parisian refugee named Babette (Stephane Audran), who quietly learns their language and their ways. These characters reach a milestone of sorts on the occasion of the late minister's 100th birthday, when Babette prepares a celebratory feast and surprises everyone in the process.

The movie covers a considerable number of years, but even so the characters feel hastily sketched. Beyond leading uneventful lives, Martina and Philippa actually struck me as defective, emotionally if not intellectually, which hampered my ability to follow their story to the end. The less anemic Babette doesn't get a lot of screen time, and the others adhere to the standard guest list for a homespun European film (quirky provincials with the occasional aristocrat). To be fair, however, the meat of "Babette's Feast" is its late-coming, overarching message about the virtue of tangible beauty (for lack of a better word). If not intriguing in their own right, the characters represent various ways in which people mistakenly shun the thing that could most enrich their lives. The sisters and their religious brethren are too narrow and dismissive of earthly pleasures, while the dashing officer (played in later life by Jarl Kulle) is overly desirous of wealth and repute. Babette's lavish, wholly unexpected spread reveals to them that their chosen way is not the only one, and that pure, benign joy can derive from human gratification. Furthermore, the experience of such joy allows them finally to find common ground and become one in a spirit of friendship.

This is a nice moral, punctuated by the notion that an artist like Babette regards the creating and giving of beauty as a treasure. Yet her feast is too dry, and thus too meager, for my tastes. That a single dinner is the brightest spot in these people's tedious lives makes the value of artistic triumph hard to swallow.

Copyright © 2006 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.