Isak Dinesen’s tale “Babette’s Feast” is contained in her last collection, Anecdotes of Destiny (1958), and it is one of the author’s finest; it is a sort of miracle that Gabriel Axel’s film adaptation does not diminish it. I know little about Axel, a Dane who grew up in France and acted in Jouvet’s company (which means he can’t be a spring chicken, to use a culinary metaphor this patent gastronome would appreciate); I cannot recall encountering his previous films. In any case, the movie Babette’s Feast is, like the tale, enormously civilized, steeped in provocative irony, and exalted by strong sentiments eloquently restrained.
Written and directed by Axel, the film begins with two senescent but still comely sisters living in a small fishing village on Denmark’s bleak Jutland peninsula. (The tale is situated in Norway, but no matter.) Martine and Philippa, named after Luther and Melanchthon, are the daughters and spiritual heirs of the late dean, who led his tiny Lutheran community in a religion as austere as the land and seascape, with preaching and hymn-singing as forbidding as the water-soaked and boiled cod and squid and the grim water-and-beer-soaked “ale bread” on which the community largely subsists. Near the start, we see one of the sisters offering an old man typical alms: some pale blue woolens and some earth-colored soup. These will be the colors of the film.
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