Babettes Gæstebud
When I was in high school our teacher asked us to watch “Babettes
Gæstebud” (Babette’s Feast) while she was away. You should never ask this of
high school students. We watched “Dirty Harry” instead and agreed to simply say
about “Babettes Gæstebud” that it was “okay, but a bit slow”. This is actually
deeply unfair. “Babettes Gæstebud” may be a bit slow but it is a great movie
with a lot to think about.
We are on the west coast of Jutland in what was and still is
known as the bible belt of Denmark. The only place name given is the manor of
Nørre Vosborg and that makes perfect sense. It is the 1830’ies and out there in
a small community lives an elderly priest (Pouel Kern) with his two young and
beautiful daughters, Fillipa (Hanne Stensgaard/Bodil Kjer) and Martine (Vibeke
Hastrup/Birgitte Federspiel). They form the core of a very pious sect in their
village. All three are convinced their religious duty goes ahead of anything
else, certainly ahead of something as trivial as marriage. All suitors are
rebuffed. This includes the young Swedish lieutenant Lorens Löwenhielm (Gudmar
Wivesson/Jarl Kulle) who even joins the sect for awhile through his pious aunt.
Another visitor is the French opera singer Achille Papin (Jean
Philippe Lafont). He gets infatuated with the voice of Fillipa and is convinced
she will take Paris with storm, but she withdraws when she feels uncomfortable with
those prospects.
Fast forward to 1871. The now middle-aged sisters get a
visitor from France. This is a refugee from the Paris commune whom Papin has recommended
to seek refuge with the sisters. He mentions that Babette (Stéphane Audran) can
cook and as she offers to work without wages, she becomes housekeeper for the
sisters. Babette slowly learns the language, customs and cuisine of her hosts
and is well liked.
Another 14 years passes and the now elderly religious
community is falling apart. Pettiness and quarrels dominate their meetings and
with the 100-year anniversary of the long dead pastor coming up the sisters are
worried. Then Babette wins a large sum of money in the French lottery (10,000 francs)
and offers, insists, on preparing a French dinner for the anniversary party.
She just needs to do a bit of shopping. When her groceries arrive, the
community is shocked. Everything looks very outlandish and suspect. Convinced
they are in for a witch-sabbath, they decide to stay quiet during the meal and
ignore what they are eating.
For the feast, Löwenhielm shows up, now a general, after 35
years of absence and as the dishes come in, he is the only one who recognizes
how exceptional the meal is. In fact, the highlight of the dinner, “Cailles en
Sarcophage”, can only come from the former famous head chef of the exclusive
Parisian restaurant Cafe Anglais, revealing that Babette, the humble
housekeeper is in fact a renowned master chef. The effect of the dinner on the
guests is remarkable. From the initial quietness they thaw and the meal
functions as a catalyst to mend all their quarrels and bring them all together
in joy.
This is an amazing movie, a curious mix of “Ordet” and “Tampopo”.
This religious community who are longing so much for their paradise that they
are almost dead to the world, being outdone in generosity and spiritual gift by
this French woman and her food. There is a power in this meal, this gift, that
mends all their problems, bring Martine and Löwenhielm together and teaches the
sisters a lesson in humility. The great thing of course is that Babette is not religious
at all. Never does she take part in the community worshipping, yet her life,
appearance and gratitude are the Lutheran Christian values in practice. In a
community of self-righteous parsimonious fools, she is the saint.
What starts out as a fairly dry and slow story begins to
reveal cracks of comedy about midway into the movie. The community are revealed
as barbarian next to Babatte and when we get to the actual feast, this becomes
glaringly exposed. The dinner is not made to mock them or expose them, but to
watch their confusion and how they look to the general for clues how to eat the
food is hilarious. They are like children watching a plane for the very first
time and reversely knowing now the capabilities of Babette thinking back on how
she was instructed in preparing dried fish and øllebrød becomes a joke activated
half an hour after it was planted.
The production value is high, higher than was common for
Danish movies at the time and much care was made to make it look authentic. It
is also absolutely believable. The one point where the illusion falls apart is
the accents. All Danish is spoken as standard Danish and not a hint of west
coast dialect. I would have loved if they would have made the attempt, yet the
price would have been that not even Danish people would have understood a word
of it.
“Babettes Gæstebud” won the Best Foreign Language Film award
for 1987 and is apparently on the Vatican list of “Most important films”. The
full menu can be found on the Wiki page of the movie and is indeed a feast even
to read. This is a great movie even if you only watch it for the food, but it
offers so much more.
Back is the day our teacher only learned we never watched
the movie on our graduation day, yet the joke is on us. We missed something not
watching “Babette’s Feast”.
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